biography
| name: |
Perl, Martin (Lewis)
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1927– )
|
| biography:
| Physicist, born in Brooklyn, New York, USA. After working as an engineer with the General Electric Co (1948–50) he took his PhD at Columbia University (1955), and taught at the University of Michigan (1955–63) before joining the faculty at Stanford University (1963). His life's work was the study of elementary particles, and it was his work in the 1970s, using the Stanford Linear Accelerator, that led to his detection of the tau lepton - a short-lived, heavyweight cousin of the electron and one of the fundamental building blocks of matter. His discovery lends support to the ‘Big Bang’ theory of creation. For this work he shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physics. He has also worked on the applications of optics and electonics, and is known as an environmentalist and long-standing opponent of nuclear weapons. |
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