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Martin Perl, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from Stanford University who discovered a subatomic particle known as the tau lepton, has died at age 87.
The university said the retired professor, one of two American scientists who shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1995, died at Stanford Hospital on Tuesday.
He was recognized for work he did during the 1970s at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, a federally funded laboratory where scientists investigate the tiniest pieces of nature.
At the time Perl discovered the tau lepton, many physicists doubted the particle — that would turn out to be a heavyweight cousin of the electron — existed. He eventually proved them wrong using a new kind of accelerator in which electrons and positrons course in opposite directions and collide.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/nobel-winning-physicist-martin-perl-dies-age-87-25918793
(Score: 2) by hubie on Saturday October 04 2014, @12:33AM
A 2009 editorial he wrote in Phys. Rev. Lett. [aps.org].
(Score: 1) by mathinker on Saturday October 04 2014, @08:04PM
Thanks for interesting link. I found the last section, entitled "The sociology of experimentation in particle physics", a bit suspect. The section states that "Collaborations now have as many as two thousand physicists, engineers, and students" and posits that this means that it is more likely that "difficult personalities are weeded out".
I have no personal experience as a particle physicist, so for all I know Perl was right. Nor am I a sociologist. However, my personal experience in working as a part of various collaborations at my work makes me suspect that it is unlikely that everyone credited in such a collaboration necessarily interacted with more people relative to previous research efforts, and I certainly find it hard to believe that any such increase in the average number of interpersonal interactions would behave linearly in the number of collaborators ("Oh, it's Monday morning... let's start my week by replying to the 2000 emails I have from my collaborators"... er, no).
See also: Dunbar's number [wikipedia.org].