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Richard E. Taylor

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Scientist

The Resume

    (November 2, 1929-February 22, 2018)
    Born in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada
    Co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics for the deep inelastic scattering of electrons by protons, producing the first experiment evidence for the existence of quarks (1990)

Why he might be annoying:

    As a teen, he lost part of three fingers on his left hand in an explosion of the chemistry lab he set up in the basement of his home.
    He originally planned to be a surgeon until a doctor told him, ‘People aren’t going to come to a surgeon without fingers.’
    Because he had failed Latin, he did not receive a high school diploma.

Why he might not be annoying:

    He was married to Rita Bonneau for 66 years.
    He oversaw the design and construction of the two-story tall spectrometer at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).
    He was a hands-on researcher who would volunteer to take the unpopular early morning shift during round-the-clock SLAC experiments.
    He regretted that Nobel Prizes were limited to three recipients (’There’s no way to do it fairly with three’) and invited thirty people who had worked on the experiment to accompany him to Stockholm for the award ceremony.

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 3 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 16 Votes: 68.75% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 12 Votes: 25.00% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 10 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 19 Votes: 47.37% Annoying