Martin Lewis Perl was born in New York City on June 24, 1927. And although Perl won a physics medal when he graduated from high school in 1943, he never considered a career in science. His Russian immigrant family thought a career in engineering would be more profitable than a career in pure science. This was still an unusual career choice for a Jewish boy at the time because there were feelings of anti-Semitism in the engineering field, but it was an area that combined Perl's interest in mechanics, mathematics, and science. He enrolled at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. He has attributed his early interest in chemical engineering to the exciting nature of the chemical field at the time. Chemistry had captured the public imagination by introducing such popular synthetic materials as nylon.
At the start of World War II, Perl wanted to put his education on hold and enter the United States Army, but he wasn't yet 18 and his parents refused permission for him to enlist. He was, however, allowed to enter the Kings Point Merchant Marine Academy as an engineering cadet. He served six months at sea as part of the training. After the war's end in 1945, but the draft was still in effect, and Perl was drafted into the army. He spent a year in Washington, D.C., before returning to college and receiving a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering, summa cum laude, in 1948.
After college, Perl worked for the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York, as a chemical engineer in the electron tube division. He was involved in trouble-shooting and designing production improvements for television picture tubes. It was necessary for him to learn something about the workings of electron vacuum tubes, so he took courses at Union College in Schenectady. One day a professor he had come to know, Vladimir Rojansky, told him, "Martin, what you are interested in is called physics not chemistry!"
Perl entered the physics doctoral program at Columbia University in 1950. His background in physics amounted to only one year of elementary physics and a half year in atomic physics, nowhere near the educational preparation of his fellow students. He has said that he was "arrogant" about his ability to learn anything fast, and that by the time he realized the difficulty of the curriculum, it was too late to back out.
Upon graduation in 1955, Perl began his career in the physics department of the University of Michigan. While affiliated with Michigan, he performed experiments at the Brookhaven Cosmotron in New York state, and the Berkeley Bevatron in California. These experiments were in strong interaction physics, but by 1962 his interests were moving toward lepton physics, a field he considered "simpler." In "The Discovery of the Tau Lepton," Perl states that he had always liked simple theory "and it was clear that strong interaction theory was not becoming simpler...[T]he physics of leptons seemed a simpler world."
Perl accepted a position at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), at Stanford University in California, in 1963. The facility was the site of the SPEAR Positron-Electron storage ring which Perl would use in his positron-electron colliding beam search for heavy leptons. A 1971 proposal for an experiment, the first to involve a search for a heavy lepton, devoted just three pages to the tau lepton search, because "to most others it seemed a remote dream."
Despite the tau lepton's lifespan of less than a trillionth of a second, Perl and his colleagues were able to prove its existence by showing that events in the experiment could not be explained away by the decay or production of any other known particles. The discovery paved the way for other physicists to find the bottom and top quarks, thereby completing the standard model of fundamental particles that explains all of the forces and interactions in matter and energy. The discovery was a total surprise to the physics community in 1975. Stanley Wojcicki, a colleague at SLAC, has called it "the best kind of discovery," and says that Perl "caught people completely out of the blue. No one anticipated it." For this discovery he was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Frederick Reines, discoverer of the neutrino.
Perl was a member of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) Scientific Policy Committee from 1990 to 1993. He was also chairman of the High-Energy Physics Faculty at SLAC from 1991 to 1997. Perl remains a SLAC professor as of 2001.
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