October 20, 1995: Volume 35, Number 4

Nobel winner has Union roots

Union may have given Martin Perl, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics announced recently, the nudge he needed to pursue a career in physics.

Perl was a young chemical engineer working at General Electric, when he took two courses -- advanced calculus and nuclear physics with Prof. Vladimir Rojansky.

"...Rojansky's lectures were so compelling he was left with no choice but to resign from G.E. and pursue an advanced degree in physics," wrote former professor David Peak in a history of physics at Union (in Early Science and the First Century of Physics at Union College by Ennis Pilcher).

In 1955, Perl received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, and just a few weeks ago he won the Nobel Prize for his 1975 discovery of a new elementary particle known as the tau lepton.

Perl, who has been a professor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) at Stanford University since 1963, shares the prize with Frederick Reines of the University of California at Irvine. The prize will be presented in Stockholm, Sweden, in December.

The tau lepton is a superheavy "cousin" of the electron, the carrier of electric current in household appliances. The tau lepton and the electron are nearly identical, except the tau is more than 3,500 times heavier than the electron and it survives less than a trillionth of a second, while the electron is stable.

Perl was working at the Stanford Positron-Electron Asymmetric Ring (SPEAR) with 30 other physicists in the mid-1970s, when he began to find events that could not be explained by any other sub-atomic particle. After over a year of work, Perl was able to convince his colleagues that they were observing a new elementary particle, which he named the "tau."

In 1982, Perl was awarded the Wolf Prize for his discovery. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and is a fellow with the American Physical Society. He is currently group leader and chairman of the faculty at SLAC.

Rojansky was professor of physics at Union College from 1930 until 1955, and is well-known for his work in quantum theory. Out of the Union Physics department have come several recognized names; Lee Davenport '37, President of GTE and long-time Union trustee; Gordon Gould '41 inventor of the laser, and Baruch Blumberg '45, Nobel prize winner in medicine.

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