Jerome Friedman

Jerome Friedman shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with his colleague Richard Taylor for experiments proving that protons, neutrons and the other elementary particles of the atom are made of even more fundamental building blocks, known as quarks. Friedman was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of immigrants from Russia. As a young person, he excelled at art rather than science, but his interest in physics was piqued by reading a book by Albert Einstein. He turned down a scholarship from the Art Institute of Chicago to study physics at the University of Chicago. There, he worked with the renowned Enrico Fermi, father of nuclear fission. Friedman received his Ph.D. in 1956. Four years later, he joined the faculty of MIT, where he has spent the rest of his career. In 1968 and '69, he performed the experiments, along with Richard Taylor of the Stanford Linear Accelerator, which gave the first experimental evidence that protons had an internal structure, later understood to be quarks. In this podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 1991 Summit in New York City, Dr. Friedman recounts the encouragement he received from his immigrant parents, and his early discovery of the excitement of theoretical physics.