Jerome Friedman

Today is the birthday of physicist Jerome Friedman, born in Chicago in 1930. His parents were immigrants from Russia—his mother had arrived in the US on one of the last voyages of the Lusitania before it was torpedoed and sunk in 1915. Friedman’s first love was art, but he became enamored of physics after reading Einstein’s book Relativity. Friedman attended the University of Chicago and was supervised by Enrico Fermi. In the late 1960s Friedman teamed with Henry Kendall, Richard Taylor, and others to probe the composition of protons and neutrons. Theorists had suggested that these atomic particles were made up of even more fundamental particles—entities that Murray Gell-Mann termed “quarks.” At a 2-mile-long accelerator at Stanford University, Friedman and colleagues measured the behavior of electrons that slammed into atomic nuclei. The experiment revealed that protons and neutrons have an inner structure. Not only did Friedman and his team uncover the first hard evidence of quarks, they also saw hints of gluons, the force-carrying particles that hold quarks together. Friedman, Kendall, and Taylor shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Date in History: 28 March 1930