Jerome Friedman | Biography

Jerome Friedman was born in Chicago on March 28, 1930, the younger of two sons of Selig and Lillian Warsaw Friedman. Selig Friedman had immigrated to the United States in 1913. Friedman's early interests revolved around art and music, but he redirected his energies after a chance encounter with Albert Einstein's book Relativity. Even though he was offered a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago, Friedman decided to pursue this new interest in science by studying physics at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s. While at the university, he had the opportunity to work on projects with physicistsEnrico Fermi and Valentine Telegdi. Remaining at the University of Chicago for the bulk of his studies, Friedman received his bachelor's degree in physics in 1950, his master's degree in 1953, and his doctorate in 1956.

The focus of Friedman's research--nuclear physics--was determined early in his academic career. While still at Chicago, Friedman carried out studies on the "weak force," which explains changes such as beta, or organic particle, decay. He chose to continue in this field when he left school in late 1956 to accept an appointment as research associate at Stanford University's High Energy Physics Laboratory. Robert Hofstadter --winner of 1961 Nobel Prize in physics for his research on the structure of protons and neutrons--was director of the laboratory. Hofstadter's work during the 1950s constituted the latest in physicists' efforts to define the smallest building blocks of matter. When scientist John Dalton first announced his atomic theory in 1808, he indicated that atoms constituted these basic components. Near the end of the nineteenth century, Sir Joseph John Thomson showed Dalton's hypothesis was incorrect by identifying electrons. Two decades later, physicist Ernest Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus and a second subatomic particle, the proton. In 1932, Rutherford's student James Chadwick discovered a third particle, the neutron.

For some time, the belief that atoms consisted of three fundamental particles--proton, neutron, and electron--appeared to explain much observed phenomena. The invention of particle accelerators in the 1930s, however, soon invalidated this view. First dozens, and later hundreds, of new elementary particles were discovered as the by-products of these "atom smashers," which sped subatomic fragments toward atoms at high velocities. Upon being struck, the atoms would break and their fragmentary contents could be studied. In 1964, physicist Murray Gell-Mann postulated that some of these tiny fragments--which he named quarks--were the smallest components of all "fundamental" particles. The problem was that no one had ever observed a quark (indeed, many physicists thought that the concept was no more than a mathematical construction for bringing order to particle physics). Hofstadter's research provided the first hint that quarks might actually have measurable physical properties. He bombarded atomic nuclei with the high-powered electron beams of the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLA) and found evidence for structure within protons and neutrons. From the way electron beams were scattered by nucleons (protons and neutrons), Hofstadter concluded that these particles were not discreet points, but "fuzzy little balls" which probably had a more detailed structure as yet undetectable in his research.

It was into this research setting that Friedman came in 1957. He disagreed with researchers who felt that Hofstadter's work was essentially complete. Friedman's stance was supported by two factors. First, improvements in the SLA vastly increased the ability of its electron beam to penetrate the atomic nucleus, allowing researchers a clearer look at protons and neutrons. Secondly, a suggestion by theoretical physicist James Bjorken prompted Friedman, Henry Kendall, and Richard Taylor to look more closely at the nature of inelastic collisions (in which nucleons are actually blown apart) rather than at elastic collisions (in which electrons are scattered by nucleons, which then remain intact). In following up on Bjorken's suggestion, Friedman, Kendall, and Taylor found that their data strongly suggested the existence of tiny points of matter within nucleons which could be identified by their tendency to deflect electrons during inelastic scattering. This confirmation of the existence of quarks and gluons (the matter that holds quarks together) not only gave scientists a more complete picture of atomic structure, it also validated the theories advanced by Gell-Mann and Hofstadter.

Over the course of his career in physics, Friedman has held a number of academic posts. He rose from researcher to professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1960; he also served as director of MIT's Laboratory of Nuclear Science (LNS) from 1980 to 1983 and as head of its physics department from 1983 to 1988. He is currently the Institute Professor of Physics at the LNS. In addition to his academic research, Friedman has been involved in many administrative and political endeavors in the scientific community (he has, for example, served as a member of the Department of Energy's High Energy Advisory Panel and as chairman of the Science Policy Committee for the construction of the Superconducting Super Collider). Along with the Nobel Prize, Friedman and his associates also received the 1989 W. K. H. Panofsky Prize from the American Physical Society (APS). Friedman served as president of the APS, stepping down in 2000.

In 1956, Friedman married the former Tania Letesky-Baranovsky, with whom he has four children: Ellena, Joel, Martin, and Sandra.