Samuel Ting (1936– )

Happy Birthday to Nobel Prize Winner Samuel Ting! Ting was born on January 27, 1936, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His parents, Kuan-hai Ting (丁觀海) and Tsun-ying Jeanne Wang (王雋英), met and married as graduate students at the University of Michigan. His parents were from Rizhao County (日照縣) in the Shandong province of China. Ting’s parents returned to Rizhao two months after his birth but due to the Chinese civil war, eventually moved to Taiwan. In 1956, Ting was invited to attend the University of Michigan. There, he studied engineering, mathematics, and physics. In 1959, he was awarded BAs in both mathematics and physics, and in 1962, he earned a doctorate in physics. In 1963, he worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which would later become CERN. From 1965, he taught at Columbia University and worked at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Germany. Since 1969, Ting has been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1976, Ting was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with Burton Richter of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, for the discovery of the J/ψ meson nuclear particle. They were chosen “for their pioneering work in the discovery of a heavy elementary particle of a new kind.” The discovery was made in 1974 when Ting was heading a research team at MIT exploring new regimes of high energy particle physics In 1995, Ting proposed the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a space-borne cosmic-ray detector. The proposal was accepted and he became the principal investigator. A prototype, AMS-01, was flown and tested on Space Shuttle mission STS-91 in 1998. The main mission, AMS-02, was then planned for launch by the Shuttle for mounting on the International Space Station. Due to the 2003 Space Shuttle disaster, AMS-02 was kicked off the manifest for the remaining flights until a successful lobbying effort by Ting got an additional flight added to the list. Since 2011 the instrument has been sending a steady stream of data back to Earth.

Date in History: 27 January 1936