The Nobel Prize
An international award administered by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden, the Nobel Prize is awarded annually for achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. The award is presented during the annual Prize Ceremony at the Stockholm Concert Hall where His Majesty the King of Sweden hands each laureate a medal, a diploma, and a document confirming the Nobel Prize amount.
In 1990, the Nobel Prize in Physics, valued at 4 million Swedish crowns, was awarded to Jerome I. Friedman, Henry W. Kendall, and Richard E. Taylor for their ground-breaking research on deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons. These investigations have been of essential importance to the development of the quark model in particle physics. Although Richard E. Taylor performed the research that led to this award at Stanford University in California, he had his start in physics research at the University of Alberta. He was born in Medicine Hat, Alberta and completed both his undergraduate and master's degrees at the University of Alberta. After graduating with an MSc in 1952, Taylor moved to Stanford University where he has remained.
In experiments conducted between 1968 and 1973 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, he and his colleagues provided the first physical evidence for quarks, now recognized as the building blocks of 99% of all matter on earth. A Stanford University Physics faculty member since 1962, Dr Taylor worked in Stanford's famous High Energy Physics Laboratory and later helped direct construction of the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Built in the mid–60s at a cost of $114 million, that accelerator remains the world's largest electron microscope.