Medicine Hat native and Nobel prize winner Richard Taylor dies

By Medicine Hat News on February 24, 2018.

Medicine Hat News

Medicine Hat native and Nobel Laureate Richard Edward Taylor died Thursday at his home on the Stanford University campus.

He was 88.

A physics professor at Stanford and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Taylor had conducted experiments that revealed quark particles for the first time, which earned him the Nobel prize in physics in 1990 along with colleagues at MIT.

It was a far cry from his grade school years in the Hat and then university in Edmonton, as Taylor once told the News of his not-so-stellar book smarts back then.

“I did not matriculate from Alexandra High School,” Taylor told the News in March of 2012.

“I failed Latin. I failed it not too badly in the spring and much worse in the supplemental in the fall.”

But with a potential which was evident, a door was opened to the University of Alberta for the physicist.

“I was not by any means a killer student,” Taylor said of his time at both the U of A and graduate school at Stanford.

But he added it takes hard work and a lot of luck to win a Nobel Prize.

“If you are sort of average and still work pretty hard then you need a lot of luck,” said Taylor. “I needed a lot of luck.”

Taylor was remembered fondly by colleagues at Stanford.

“Dick Taylor has been an important presence in my life since I was a child,” former SLAC director Persis Drell said on the Stanford website. “He was a towering figure — both physically and intellectually. But beneath his gruff exterior was a heart of gold.

“His Nobel Prize research … put SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) on the map.”

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