Henry Way Kendall

Henry Way Kendall (December 9, 1926 – February 15, 1999) was an American experimental particle physicist who shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics with Jerome I. Friedman and Richard E. Taylor for their pioneering investigations of deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, providing key experimental evidence for the existence of quarks as fundamental constituents of nucleons.

Kendall earned a B.A. from Amherst College in 1950 and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1955, where he spent his career as a professor of physics, eventually becoming the Julius A. Stratton Professor. His groundbreaking experiments, conducted at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, involved bombarding protons with high-energy electrons to probe their internal structure, revealing point-like scattering centers consistent with the quark model proposed by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig. This work fundamentally advanced the understanding of quantum chromodynamics and the standard model of particle physics.