Richard E. Taylor

Richard Edward Taylor was an experimental physicist raised in Medicine Hat, Alberta, who earned degrees at the University of Alberta and Stanford University. In the late 1960s, leading experimental team SLAC-MIT with Jerome Friedman and Henry Kendall at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Taylor directed high-energy electron collisions against protons and neutrons.

Their measurements revealed unexpected point-like scattering centers within nucleons, confirming Murray Gell-Mann's theoretical quark model and laying the experimental cornerstone for the Standard Model of particle physics. Taylor shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics and was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.