SLAC, 28 May 1997

Taylor Elected to Royal Society of London

Richard Taylor, physics professor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and 1990 Nobel Prize winner, was recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, an independent scientific academy founded in 1660 by Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle and Robert Moray. Each year forty new Fellows are elected by merit, not field, and membership is limited to those who are citizens of the Great Britain or the British Commonwealth. Up to six foreign members may also be elected each year.

The Society began with the aim of promoting public understanding of science and that aim continues with a broad range of services such as meetings, exhibits and scientific exchanges. The Society motto "Nullius in Verba" reflects the Society's philosophy that statements must be verified by facts. Taylor will travel to London in the near future for his induction, part of which requires that he sign the Society's membership book, which includes such famous names as Isaac Newton and Michael Faraday.

Taylor, a Canadian citizen, received his Ph.D. at Stanford in 1962 and was appointed to the faculty at SLAC, a national research facility funded by the United States Department of Energy, in 1968 where his research involved the internal structure of the proton and neutron. This work and other studies of electrons scattered from these objects suggested a substructure of much smaller particles, which came to be known as quarks. The 1990 Nobel Prize was jointly awarded to Taylor, J.F. Friedman, and H.W. Kendall for deep inelastic scattering. He continues research on electron scattering at DESY in Germany and with a group at Laboratoire de l'Accélérateur Linéaire (LAL) in Orsay, France, as well as other activities conducted at SLAC.

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Text of award announcement by P.A. Moore