Professor Jerry Friedman

Our guest for the July, 2003 Quasar Club was Professor Jerry Friedman, Nobel Prizewinner in Physics.

Professor Friedman and his collaborators won the 1990 prize by proving the existence of quarks. These elementary subnuclear particles, which have varieties such as "charmed" adn "strange", have chrages equal to fractions of that on an electron! The evidence for quarks came from experiments that watched what happens in a particle accelerator when target protons and neutrons are bobarded with high-energy electrons. You can find out more about this topic at http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/vvc/nobel/1990nobel.html.

This Quasar Club activity started with a discussion of the ideas behind Professor Friedman's research, before meeting him in a small group for an informal question-and-answer session about his work and his life in science.