They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Of course it's true, but words paint pictures, too. In a recent conversation with Les Cottrell, it hit me how lucky I was not only to talk with such a fun, passionately curious character (he keeps his patent for an interactive raster-scanned display device and a worn pair of soccer boots in the same desk drawer!) but also to hear him reflect on a significant achievement while gazing upon its visual record. (See my profile of him here.)
Years ago, Cottrell had prepared a presentation about his life for a group of Girl Scouts. For whatever reason, the presentation fell through. The Girl Scouts' loss was my gain, as he used the presentation to walk me through his former home in Cornwall, England; a trip to China a few months after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests; stints at IBM and CERN; helping to set a world record for Internet speed (see his Web site for details); and his 1968 arrival at SLAC, where Richard E. Taylor offered him a position on his research team as a "renegade physicist computer geek," as Cottrell puts it.
This particular work led to the Nobel Prize in Physics for Taylor, Henry W. Kendall and Jerome E. Friedman in 1990.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Cottrell and the rest of the team worked night and day on experiments that led to the first evidence for the quark. They fired beams of electrons from SLAC's two-mile-long linear accelerator at targets of liquid hydrogen and deuterium. From the way the electrons scattered as they hit these targets, the scientists deduced that protons must be made of even smaller particles. (Read Taylor's Nobel banquet speech here. A description of the work is here.)
A physicist by training, Cottrell partook in data analysis and worked in the control room, but mainly he worked on real-time data acquisition.
"When we got the Nobel Prize, we all bundled off to Stockholm. Dick Taylor was really great. He didn't just say, 'I'll take the money and run,' he made sure other people traveled with him," Cottrell said, looking at the photo of his friends posing at the dinner ceremony. "There I am, either holding up or being held up by everybody else back in the middle. We really worked bloody hard. With sickness there were often only about nine people--three were needed per shift--and you would run for about six weeks. It was grueling--maybe you got a day off, maybe you didn't--but it was very rewarding."
The photo's cast of characters:
(Kneeling, from left) Nobel Laureates in Physics Richard ‘Dick' Taylor, Jerry Friedman, and Henry Kendall. (Standing, from left) Collaborators Arie Bodek, David Coward, Michael ‘Ed' Riordan, Elliott Bloom, James ‘Bj' Bjorken, Roger ‘Les' Cottrell, Guthrie Miller, Martin ‘Marty' Breidenbach, Jurgen Drees, Wolfgang ‘Pief' Panofsky, Luke Mo, William ‘Bill' Atwood. Herbert 'Hobey' DeStaebler was added to the group shot later; he was reportedly still getting dressed when the original photo was taken. He's at the far right in the color version of the photo.
By symmetry intern Matt Cunningham
