Friedman, Jerome Isaac
FRIEDMAN, JEROME ISAAC
FRIEDMAN, JEROME ISAAC (1930– ), physicist. Friedman studied at the University of Chicago from which he received his A.B. (1950), his M.A. (1953), and his Ph.D. (1956) in physics. After working as a research associate there and at Stanford University, he joined the faculty of mit in 1960, becoming a professor in 1967 and an institute professor in 1991. At mit he was also the director of the laboratory for nuclear science (1980–83) and head of the physics department (1983–88). In addition, he served as president of the American Physical Society in 1999. He was co-recipient of the 1990 Nobel Prize in physics with Richard Taylor and Henry Kendall for work they had done at the Stanford Linear Acceleration Center 1967–73, which showed that protons and neutrons were composed of quarks rather than being fundamental particles. In doing so, they also proved the existence of quarks which had been regarded until then as theoretical and highly implausible by most of the physics community. Their work also established the experimental foundations for the development of quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the so-called strong force, which is responsible for binding quarks together to form all hadronic matter.