Henry Kendall

Henry Way Kendall (December 9, 1926 ’Ŭ February 15, 1999) was a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist and an ardent advocate for environmental causes. He enrolled in the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in 1945 and served on a troop transport ship on the North Atlantic. Kendall graduated from Amherst in 1950 and while in college operated a diving and marine salvage company during two summers and co-authored books on diving and underwater photography. He obtained his doctorate in nuclear and atomic physics from MIT and then spent five years at Stanford in the late 1950s and early 1960s, studying the structure of protons and neutrons. Kendall returned to the MIT Physics Department, where he remained the rest of his life. In the early 1970s, he worked in collaboration with researchers Jerome Friedman and Richard Taylor on experiments that demonstrated the first experimental evidence that the protons and neutrons were made up of point-like particles, later identified to be the up and down quarks that had previously been proposed on theoretical grounds. The experiments also provided the first evidence for the existence of gluons. Kendall won the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics (with Friedman and Taylor) for their pioneering investigations concerning the deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which were of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics. Kendall was also one of the founding members of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and served as chairman of the anti-war group for more than 25 years. He composed the highly publicized but politically-ignored ’źWorld Scientists Warning to Humanity’Ź published in 1992 and co-signed by 1,700 scientists world-wide, which called for policy changes in government and business to avert environmental destruction that would cause widespread human misery and leave the Earth irretrievably damaged. In 1997, he was among the scientists who presented President Bill Clinton with a detailed explanation of the coming crisis of global climate change. In 1999, Kendall died of natural causes while scuba diving in the caves at the Wakulla Springs State Park in Florida. Henry Kendall addressed the student delegates at the 1993 Achievement Summit at Glacier National Park on the environment, population growth, and climate change.