Henry Way Kendall

Henry Way Kendall ( born December 9, 1926 in Boston, † 15 February 1999 Wakulla Springs State Park, Florida ) was an American physicist and Nobel laureate.

Kendall went to Deerfield Academy and Amherst College, where in 1950 he took a mathematics degree. He then studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his doctorate in 1955. At that time he studied in experiments positronium. As a post-doc, he was in the group of Robert Hofstadter at Stanford University and the accelerator SLAC, where he worked together with his later co- Nobel Prize winners Jerome I. Friedman and Richard E. Taylor in high- energy scattering experiments of electrons on protons and nuclei. From the 1960s he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT ), where he remained for the rest of his career. In the electron scattering experiments at SLAC he showed with his colleagues in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the existence of previously by Murray Gell-Mann and others postulated quarks ( and also found the first indications of gluons ) as point-like scattering centers in nucleons.

Kendall in 1990 along with Jerome I. Friedman and Richard E. Taylor of the Nobel Prize in Physics awarded for their experiments for the detection of quarks. In 1989 he was awarded the Panofsky Prize with Friedman and Taylor.

Kendall was co-founder and longtime chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists. He was a member of the JASON Defense Advisory Group. Kendall was a passionate photographer and mountaineer. He died on 15 February 1999 from a severe abdominal bleeding during a diving expedition in underwater caves in the Wakulla Springs State Park in Florida.