Richard Taylor, 1929-2018

Philip Bambade:  

I certainly remember, besides his deep voice, sharp statements and often visionary positions in our field,    
that he was a very kind person, caring about people. He for instance always asked about how I adapted back at   LAL and in France after my years at SLAC. Just after being recruited to the CNRS, he actually wrote me a page  long letter, with some "advice" for the continuation of my career in France.

He is among the people who influenced me in my young years, whom I admired, like Karl Brown, Dave Ritson  or Gordon Bowden (even if I did not know him as well as Karl, Dave and Gordon), a kind of pillar serving as example.

Guy Wormser:

Dick was an immense physicist and also a very good friend of France when he came to the work as a young post-doc at the end the 50's in LAL (Laboratoire de l'Accélérateur Linéaire). He told us all his reminiscences from that time when he came back to LAL in 2006, for the LAL 50th birthday. Here is the video taken at this occasion.         
His slides are also available here. I attach a few photos contained in his slides from Dick and Rita at this time.

It was a very friendly move to come to Europe at this occasion. His health was declining a bit and he told me that it would probably be his last trip to Europe," où nous avait fait l'amitiè de venir en Europe spècialement à cette occasion." I keep very vivid memories of Dick. He gave me much strong and frank advice in very few words on how to go and why, and of course he was always right. LAL has benefited a lot from his advices and vision. We really lose a pioneer of our field and I will miss him a lot.

Francois Lacoste:

I met Dick Taylor, 29 years old at that time, when he arrived at LAL in 1958. I was 25 years old and preparing with Didier Isabelle the necessary apparatus for our respective PhD experiments with the initial LAL beam (only 160Mev, produced by the first 25m of LAL!).       

The first beam came on only in July 1959 and the first workable beam in September.       

You can imagine Dick's frustration, and also ours: any delay was met by a resounding "WHAT" from Dick, which Rita would try to soothe. Dick was a kind but tough supervisor doing night shifts with us and, for instance at one time, he told me that I was not working hard enough because I was not yet mean enough!       

I was very happy when Dick received his well-deserved Nobel prize and when he visited LAL on his way to Stockholm I could not resist teasing him: " How come you have a Nobel and you don't even have the necessary fingers to count up to ten?"        

I would like to thank specially Rita for all the moral support she gave to all of us, the students, by her continued presence during these tough months.

Adam Boyarski:

My first encounter with Richard Taylor was on a recruitment visit to SLAC in 1963. Richard was leading the effort to build the Beam Switchyard station at the end of the accelerator. He seemed agitated while describing the problems, and when I made a suggestion he barked loudly "I DON'T NEED ANY HELP FROM OUTSIDERS!", at which point I turned meek and we continued with a pleasant discussion. This set the tone for me that Richard was boisterous, but as time went on I found him to be a good friend, full of information, and loud at times.      

When end station A was being built, a small group was set up to purchase a computer for the acquisition of data there. Richard headed the group; I was part of the foursome as was Gene Rickansrud, Director of the Business office at the time. We chose the SDS 9300 computer and peripherals from Scientific Data Systems. When the system was delivered, the SDS salesman proudly invited us all to come see it. While we all were impressed, Richard immediately opened up the card reader to look inside and saw a small amount of rust on the inner frame. He exploded saying "THIS IS USED EQUIPMENT. SEND THIS BACK AND GIVE ME A NEW ONE!" The salesman complied with humble apologies.      

In the early days I attended some group meetings in Pief's office for computer related topics. Quite often a subject would come up that Richard had strong opinions on and he would blast the group with his viewpoint. When done Pief would simply and quietly thank Richard for his contribution and move on. Richard had his say and seemed satisfied.       

As a fellow Canadian, I will miss the talks we had about our common origins in Alberta.

Sam Howry:

Well, as an old-timer hired I remember meeting Dick Taylor for the first time in 1963, when SLAC operated out of an old warehouse on the Stanford campus (some might recall the pleasant sound on its roof when it rained).      

We soon learned that staff meetings were much more interesting whenever Dick Taylor was in the room. I heard him say that he likes to "...keep peeling off the layers (of presented proposals) until I see t.h.e d.r.y r.o.t-..."      

In 1963 he was already thinking about how to interlace the beams so that experimenters in end stations A,B, and C could "time share the beam", in his words. He'd come in to nag us "math types" to start thinking about that problem...... saying things like ... "yes, how do you send K pulses/sec to each experimenter ...Yeah! Algebra! Divisibility of integers! ...for example, relatively prime numbers of pulses/sec to each experimenter won't work ...Cmon work on on it...".      

His job at the time was to design a spectrometer for End Station A, the place that eventually held his three spectrometers that famously showed his 'Rasberry Jam' model of the proton.      

I made a suggestion that he use our nascent TRANSPORT computer program to find the positions of the magnets of his spectrometer, since we were already doing that for the beam line leading up to his end station A. He laughed and said something like: "Ha ha! - Not your problem! Forget that computer mumbo-jumbo, it's laws of physics!"      

Well, around two days later, he came into our office and slammed on my desk at least 20 pages completely full of lines of solid algebra, all written in blue ink and said, "Ok, how do we get the computer to do it?" I sure wish I'd have kept those scribbles! I'm betting that he conluded that both horizontal and vertical beam optics were required. Here's another another story I heard third-hand that others may have also stated here. It's that he drove his classic dull grey Triumph-3 sportscar down the two-mile tunnel, (presumably before the waveguide was installed!), turned it around in the then-bare switchyard, and then drove it back to the injector position and out onto Sand Hill road!

Giorgio Gratta:

How I got hired at Stanford    

When I interviewed in the physics dept in 1995 Dick was in the search committee from SLAC. "I am on the committee sort of to make sure they do not hire their cousin" was his explanation.     

So he took me to lunch with his MG convertible, sporting some archaic/bizarre seat belts. I briefly looked at the carabiner-like buckle and, click, buckled up. Dick turned around and thundered: "Wow, that is a good experimentalist! Everybody fumbles with this thing and it's the first time I see someone use it so smoothly."     

So, maybe he was only checking that they were not hiring their cousin, but I like to think that buckling up on the way to lunch was what got me the Stanford job!

Jacques Haïssinski: Hommage À Richard Taylor    

I admired Dick in many ways. His passing away represents a great loss to me.   

 

I am a retired physicist who belonged to the Laboratoire de l'Accélérateur Linéaire (LAL) at Orsay most of my professional life, but I was a graduate student at Stanford from 1958 to 1960 when Richard Taylor came to LAL and participated in the setting up of the first sections of the LAL electron Linac and helped young PhD students (Didier Isabelle and François Lacoste) to finalize their detectors and collect their first data for their theses. Therefore, it was some years later that I met Dick for the first time but since then we had many opportunities to get together. Such occasions were provided by his frequent visits to LAL, for instance while he was a member of the H1 Collaboration.    
 

On my side, I went a number of times to SLAC. I worked several months there when I participated in the SPEAR commissioning and again later, when I participated in the SLC commissioning. I saw Dick regularly during these long stays. The more so since Dick was very keen to help French visitors of SLAC feel comfortable at Stanford. So, while I never worked directly with him, I interacted with him on many occasions. I always felt very fortunate for having a friendly relationship with Dick which soon developed into a friendly relationship between Rita and Dick on the one hand and my wife Yvette and myself on the other. The fact that Yvette is American certainly contributed to making such ties. This friendly relationship culminated in 2006 when Yvette and I spent several days in their home in Blairmore, Canada.    
 

As anyone who ran across him knows, Dick's personality was a strong one behind which was a great gentleness and generosity. He could state his convictions in an abrupt manner, but he was also open to different opinions if they were well backed up. I remember him telling me a number of times: "Think Big", and that was what he did. He was a concerned person, worrying about political issues on national and world scales, and a concerned physicist who kept thinking about the future of our respective labs in particular.    
 

Dick's charisma impressed all of us at LAL. As I mentioned above, Dick always gave a special attention to the French physicists he was in contact with, the young ones in particular, and I know that, conversely, these French researchers are very grateful to him for what he did for them and for his advice. Quite naturally, Jean Perez Y Jorba, then Director of our Laboratory, proposed that the Docteur Honoris Causa of the University of Paris-Sud distinction (Paris-Sud University is the second largest scientific university in France) be conferred to Richard Taylor. The ceremony took place in 1980.    

Dick and Pierre Lehmann were good friends (Pierre Lehmann was a leading high energy physicist in France ; for a long period of time, he was the Director of IN2P3, the French Institution in charge of managing all of the French academic labs in nuclear and in particle physics). When P. Lehmann passed away in 1992, I was very thankful to Dick when he accepted to contribute a video as a tribute to Pierre. His testimony was highly appreciated by the many people who knew Pierre Lehmann.    

I often benefitted from Dick's advice. Especially in 1995, when I was in charge of 'DAPNIA', a Department of the Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique (CEA) at Saclay, staffed with about 900 people doing research in astrophysics, nuclear physics and particle physics. Robert Aymar who was then head of the "Direction des sciences de la matière" of CEA, a future Directeur Général of CERN, asked Dick to chair a Committee comprising a number of high level foreign scientists to evaluate DAPNIA's organization, its scientific production and its scientific policy. The Committee members spent three days at Saclay investigating all aspects of the Department's functioning. Then Dick had to urge the very busy committee members to send him their contributions which he then synthesized into a ten page report that provided Robert Aymar and myself a detailed, in depth, well balanced evaluation of DAPNIA's operations and scientific propects. I used this report as a precious guideline for the last part of my DAPNIA management mandate. I still have it in my computer.    

Quite unfortunately, I could not see Rita and Dick again when I went to San Francisco in 2015. I was the one sick then and had to shorten my stay. I feel terribly sad today for having missed this last opportunity to spend some time with him.

Doug Bryman: 

In December, 1994 Dick participated in the celebration of the 65th birthday of Erich Vogt (one of TRIUMF's founders and early directors). This photo shows some of the organizers and speakers at this event: (from left to right) Douglas Bryman (TRIUMF), Ernest Henley (University of Washington), Sir Denys Wilkinson (Sussex), Erich Vogt (TRIUMF), Dick Taylor (SLAC), and Nathan Isgur (Jefferson Lab).

Achim Stahl: 

Together with my friends from Bonn, Ariane Frey and Jochen (Joe) Schwiening, I spent two years at SLAC sponsored by the Feodor Lynen fellowships of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Professor Dick Taylor was our official host. We only knew of him and of his work from the text books. So, as a young student I was very surprised to receive the letter of invitation from this famous physicist!

At the time, I was a bit concerned to leave my home and friends. Flights were expensive and I was quite sure that I would be away for two long years. We arrived in October 1996, and found out that someone had arranged an apartment on campus for us. Dick Taylor was away, but to my big surprise he had left an invitation to visit him on the following Saturday at his home, together with Ariane and Joe. I remember that initially I was quite nervous, but within minutes of meeting him at his home everything changed.

He was so easy-going and I felt welcome. California turned from a foreign place to a new home. We spent the whole day at his pool, and talked about this and that. It was like meeting an old friend, although he had never met us before. I remember that I was no longer concerned about the prospect of spending two years at SLAC, on the contrary, I was excited about the time ahead.

Everybody at SLAC was helpful and was trying to make us feel welcome. But it is the day at Dick's pool that I remember most. It certainly made a big difference for me. I kept meeting Dick from time to time at SLAC, and in the years after I had returned to Germany. He had become my friend and mentor.

I'm very sorry to learn that he passed away.

Wake for Dick Taylor, April 25, 2018 (PDF)

Helmut Dosch:

It was with great dismay that I learned of the death of Dick Taylor.

I only met Dick twice while visiting SLAC. I have always enjoyed his humorous and wise statements very much.

Science is losing one of its great pioneers and role models.

On behalf of the entire board of directors of DESY, I would like to convey the most heartfelt condolences to his wife Rita and son Ted.

Roger Coombes:

In later years at SLAC I found it best to visit Dick in his office in mid- afternoon as he would serve tea in fine English China. On one occasion I surreptitiously lifted the cup and turned the saucer over to see the name of the China.

Dick saw me do this and surprised me, he was very pleased.

He said he had been serving tea in this fine China for a long time but this was the first time anyone had shown interest in it. I don’t remember clearly, but I think I was pleading for more money, and probably had a positive outcome.

Albrecht Wagner:

Dick and I first got to know each other after I joined the Directorate of DESY in 1991. Dick was working with the H1 experiment and became a regular guest in Hamburg. He would on occasions appear in my office and provide me in very clear words with his opinion on certain matters.             

At first I was rather astonished about this, but quickly came to appreciate his visits and opinions as they always led to very interesting discussions which we both enjoyed. They helped sharpen my thinking and improved subsequent decisions.             

I discovered a thoughtful and very engaged man underneath a somewhat rough outer shell. Our interactions became a pleasure and in later times, when he and Rita no longer came to Hamburg, I tried whenever I was at SLAC to visit him in his office, to chat, to exchange ideas and to tap into his wisdom. I will always cherish these memories.

Mac Mestayer:

I was one of Dick's grad students. Here are some of my memories:            

He was larger than life - really - not only was he a large fellow, but the way he would stand with his chest puffed out made him seem huge. He was not in the least bit a mean-spirited person; he was a happy man who was always smiling, but still, he got a kick out of intimidating people who didn't know him well. He thought that was really funny.            

He was very gentlemanly with outsiders. I remember how nice he was when he first met my wife Kathi years after I had left SLAC. He gave her the greatest gift you can give to a new acquaintance: his attention.            

He really admired intelligence. One time he told me how disappointed he was when he met Audrey Hepburn, whom he had adored as a youth. He thought she was dumb as a doorknob. On the other hand, he was very impressed with Whoopi Goldberg. He thought she was very sharp and funny.            

More than intelligence, he admired honesty. One of his idols was a physicist who did atomic spectroscopy where the goal is to accurately measure the position of spectral lines (accuracy is everything). When this man analysed his data, he deliberately introduced a systematic mis-calibration factor to the frequencies; in other words a blind analysis. He would take the data, do the various corrections, identify and quantify the peaks and even write the whole paper without unblinding the data. Only when all this was done would he unmask the scaling factor and change the scale on his graphs and submit his paper the same day! That really impressed Dick.            

He admired Jim Cronin very much. He told me that he was the best experimental physicist in the country. He told me this after I had told him that I was applying for a post-doc position with Jim's group at the University of Chicago. He replied that that was fine but I would never get an offer. I did.            

As everyone knows, he had very colorful language. One of my favorites was when he describe a featureless, constant graph as being "flat as piss in a pan".            

I had many great mentors at SLAC, but I interacted most closely with Dick when I was writing my thesis. He taught me how to write. For example, I walked into his office after he had read a draft of the section on background subtraction. He said, "What is this nonsense?", except he didn't say "nonsense". When I responded "Well, we changed our threshold parameter and measured the number of counts within the mass limits, scaled by the efficiency and subtracted this from the overall spectra." he said "Well say that! Now get out of here."            

In addition to being very inquisitive, hard-working and "physics-smart", he was very clever. When gas prices went way up during the 1973 OPEC gas embargo, Dick went out and bought a lightly-used Cadillac for a low price, remarking on how stupid most people were and how prices would go back down soon. He was right. Another time, he told me that as soon as the draft was reinstated and the sons of congressmen were killed in Vietnam, the war would end. He was right again.            

I cannot finish my remembrance of Dick without recalling what a superb team he had assembled at SLAC. They were all really first-rate. I won't start listing names for fear of leaving someone out, but I will say that Hobey DeStaebler was his loyal and indispensable right-hand man. Hobey told me and others: "Never say anything which is irrelevant and untrue." I hope I haven't.

Jurgen Drees:

Richard Taylor, or Dick as we called him in Group A at SLAC, was the best scientific teacher I had in my life. During the time of deep inelastic electron-proton scattering the members of his group came to his office first in the morning and talked about their plans for the present working day. He gave encouragement, made adjustments. After 15 minutes the meeting was over and everybody went to work. His method created a good spirit, caused extraordinary efficiency and fast progress in measurements and data analysis leading to the publications which were finally rewarded with the prize.           
 

He stayed a lifelong friend and visited his former group members, Helmut Piel and myself, who had returned to Germany and worked on establishing a physics department at a new university, always keeping in mind what we had learned at SLAC. He gave great colloquium talks here in front of a full house.           

The photo shows him at our home at a party following his colloquium talk in 1995. This is Dick how I knew him, relaxed, ready for a joke and watching happily his scientific followers.

Norbert Wermes:

I have a very vivid memory of Dick albeit I did not know him too closely, but we met several times the first time when he was a visitor at DESY while I was still a graduate student. It was always a great pleasure discussing with him and getting a smell of his wit and far reaching views on anything even beyond science.          

From 1982 to 1985 then I was postdoc at SLAC as a Lynen Fellow of the German Alexander von Humboldt foundation with Stan Wojcicki being the host. I joined the Mark III experiment at SPEAR and Dick was the research director at the time.          

When my fellowship came to an end I was offered a staff position at SLAC with Mark II at SLC. Then it came to the unavoidable salary question and I had an appointment with Dick in his office. I was seated opposite to him as he was sitting in an easy chair in very relaxed "Dick" style.          

Dick explained very frankly to me that the rules for salary negotiations were much determined by the number of years after the PhD. Having had already calculated with my family how cost-intensive living in the bay area might be in the future, I tried to argue that a friend of mine at SLAC had a higher salary than the one offered to me, although he had the same scientific "age." Dick's blunt reply was: "Oh, he is with the accelerator, that's no fun."          

Needless to say that he violated the "rules" a bit the next day, charming as he was.

Council and Foundation of Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings:

We deeply regret to report that laureate Richard Edward Taylor passed away on 22 February 2018 at the age of 88.         

Taylor received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1990 together with Jerome I. Friedman and Henry W. Kendall for discoveries about deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, insights that have been crucial for the development of the quark model.         

Originally from Alberta, Canada, Taylor completed his Ph.D. in Physics at Stanford University. After several years at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California, he returned to Stanford University in 1962. He attended the Lindau Meeting in 1994.         

The Council and Foundation extend their deep sympathies to Richard Taylor's family. 

Erich Lohrman on behalf of Friends at DESY:

We were very sad to learn that Richard (Dick) Taylor passed away.        

For many decades we at DESY enjoyed his friendship and help. He spent the years 1981/1982 in Hamburg on an Alexander von Humboldt Award.        

Later, we remember celebrating his Nobel Prize with him in one of the excellent Hamburg restaurants. And we are specially indebted to him for help and advice he gave as a member of the scientfic council of DESY from 1982 to 1986. He had a strong voice in helping DESY to find a good way in developing its future.        

We admired him not only as a great physicist, but he will always also be remembered for his kindness and the help he gave people. Many of us, visiting SLAC, have dear and thankful memories of meeting Dick and his wife Rita. We have lost not only a great scientist but also a great friend.

Michel Davier:

I met Dick for the first time in 1963 when I was an undergraduate at Orsay doing a master thesis at LAL with Pierre Lehmann. I remember vividly Dick's seminar on the status of the construction of SLAC. He impressed me very much as a physicist, but also physically as a big person with a loud voice. He was then on a short visit, one of many to follow, and he knew the lab and everyone well as he had been there as a postdoc a few years before. The lab benefited a great deal from this energetic and experienced young fellow and several older colleagues remember this period with him which did not go unnoticed. Also Rita helped a great deal setting up our library which was very important for the development of the lab.       

Dick always provided me with good advice. First when I was a graduate student doing my PhD at SLAC with Bob Mozley who, incidentally, had been also Dick's thesis advisor. Joining the SLAC faculty in 1970, I had then plenty of opportunities to discuss with Dick. Despite being very direct, seemingly a bit rough, I was very fond of him and found that it was reciprocal. Deep inside he was quite a sentimental person, caring truly for others.       

I left SLAC in 1975 to take a professorship in Paris and eventually became the LAL director. Dick visited many times and joined our H1 group providing wise guidance. One favorite attraction was his enjoyment of quality French cuisine for which he was also an expert with high standards. And I rarely failed taking him to good places. One particular occasion was in December 1990 when Rita and Dick stopped for a few days in Paris just before going to Stockholm to receive his Nobel prize. We were all very proud of him and his textbook scientific achievement.       

I believe his last visit to Orsay was for the 50-year celebration of the lab in 2007 where he was happy to meet the old friends and we were proud to have him among us. I continued seing him from time to time when I visited SLAC. Probably on the last one I remember congratulating him on looking well to what he replied, with his usual laugh "That's the outside, you should see the inside!"       

When I was awarded the Lagarrigue prize in 2010 he kindly recorded, together with Burt Richter and Martin Perl, a video which was a great honor for me. The nice words spoken by Dick remain a treasure of friendship I will never forget.       

It is impossible to remember Dick without including Rita. As one often hears, behind every great man there is a great woman. This certainly applies well to Dick and Rita. My thoughts go to her in this very sad moment.

Michael "Ed" Riordan:

My first encounter with Dick Taylor came in May 1970, when I arrived at SLAC as a wet-behind-the-ears MIT graduate student about to become involved in the MIT-SLAC inelastic electron-scattering experiments in End Station A. Actually my initial encounter was with his booming voice echoing along a corridor of the Central Lab Annex, followed by a broad-shouldered, six-foot-plus bear of a man sporting an unruly mop of curly hair. At first I was a bit cowed by him, but I soon came to see and understand the warm-hearted person beneath all the bluster.      

My last memory of Dick, or at least my most lasting one, came on the evening of December 10, 1990, when he spoke on behalf of the physics laureates — including Jerry Friedman, Henry Kendall and himself — at the banquet after the Nobel Prize ceremonies that afternoon. I had expected the usual solemnities, but Dick regaled the august international audience (most of whom were decked out in formal wear) with a series of jokes that had us in stitches. I laughed so hard I almost knocked over my glass of wine!      

More than anyone else, it was Dick who got the huge ESA spectrometers built, especially the 8 GeV and 20 GeV spectrometers that would catch the first glimpses of quarks inside the proton and neutron during the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were marvelously supple and flexible devices that counted the number of electrons scattering from liquid hydrogen and deuterium targets at the ESA pivot at angles up to 34 degrees. Actually, the longer 20 GeV spectrometer was a little too flexible; its magnets had to be resurveyed every time one moved it to a new angle.      

My own efforts were focused on the 8 GeV spectrometer, which could be rolled out in minutes to large angles to count the electrons that scattered at higher momentum transfers. This device proved crucial in detailed testing of the predicted “scaling” of the proton (and later neutron) structure functions, confirming insights of theorist James “BJ” Bjorken and suggesting that there are point-like objects inside.      

We owe it to Dick that these spectrometers functioned so well, serving as the “eyes” that allowed dozens of physicists who worked in End Station A to peer deep within the nucleons and begin to discern the intriguing substructure within.

Vera Lüth:

A Few Encounters with Dick Taylor (PDF)

Herman Winick:

When I came to SLAC in 1973 I was in awe of the spectrometers in ESA, and took visitors to see them, as well as the end stations at SSRL.

I admired Dick for his contributions to these instruments and had several interactions with him. One that took place during SLC times (around June 1983) is particularly memorable.

This was still in the days before SSRL had its own injector. The linac was the injector to SPEAR operating 50% time as a synchrotron radiation source.

Priority was given to SLC operation, with injection to SPEAR from the linac limited to two intervals, from 6-8 am and 6-8 pm. The linac had to operate in very different modes for SLC and SPEAR injection. Furthermore, SPEAR maintenance was low on the priority list for SLAC and the reliability was poor.

It took most of 2 hours to get a circulating beam in SPEAR, but then it was often lost (due to an rf trip or other hardware malfunction) within an hour or so, and we has to wait 11 or more hours with no beam, while waiting for the next injection. I think our efficiency during this time was 30-50 %.

After several days of such frustrating operation of SPEAR, I had to explain to our users why we had so little beam time. To help with his I asked Dick Taylor, who was in charge of setting priorities for the SLAC linac, to meet with our users to explain why we had so little beam.

Dick led off this meeting with two comments. I paraphrase what he said as follows:

1. I have heard about synchrotron radiation research. It can't be very important, since, if it was important I would be doing it.
2. I have seen the June 1983 issue of Physics Today, with a lead article on synchrotron radiation research by Bienenstock and Winick, but I have not read it.

This interaction did little to satisfy our users.

The situation is much better now, with SPEAR rebuilt as a light source, and with its own injector. Our efficiency is now >98%.

David Moncton:

I enjoyed Herman Winick's comments about interactions with Dick Taylor. I remember that period vividly, particularly that meeting, or a similar one on the same subject, when I was chairman of the SSRL Users Organization.

Dick had been sent as a representative of SLAC management to discuss SPEAR reliability with the Users Organization representatives. He made two memorable comments. The first was that synchrotrons were inherently unreliable due to their technical complexity, and that secondly, as a result, they were not suitable for use by users who had to fly across the country on a specific schedule. He recommended that the users should be limited to Stanford faculty who could respond on short notice and be flexible about beam interruptions.

These comments stuck with me as we considered what the goals for the third generation facilities should be. High on the list was reliability, and when I became director of the Advanced Photon Source project, I was determined to prove that synchrotrons could be highly reliable. As you know APS has run for 20-plus years with 99+% reliability. While there were many reasons in terms of scientific effectiveness for my motivation to build a reliable machine, I do have to give Dick Taylor credit for making it a personal challenge!

Dieter and Nanna (Renate) Fries:

We have very fond memories of our stay in California, starting with our arrival in March of 1963. Dick came to see us on our first day after we arrived in Palo Alto. He spent the whole day with us, showed us our new surroundings, and invited us to his home for dinner, where we met Rita and Teddy. For us this was an equally friendly, gracious and totally unexpected welcome at Stanford, which we have never forgotten!

During these formative six years SLAC, I – Dieter – had rather little scientific contact with Dick, since I worked primarily with Bob Mozley and Allen Odian.Still, we always appreciated Dick’s interest and support of foreign visitors and employees and their families.

To you, Rita and Ted, best wishes.

Martin Berndt:

I distinctly remember the day Dick interviewed me for the job of designing the magnet power supply system for his spectrometers in End Station A. Dick did not want to farm out the job to the Accelerator Engineering group, but wanted an engineer he could supervise in his group. I had been doing power supply design work at MURA in Madison WI.

The day of my interview Dick was in the middle of negotiating the purchase of the on-line computer that would be used for the spectrometers. As I was in his office, there was Dick shouting and cursing into the telephone. I seriously asked myself whether I wanted to work for someone like that. Was he a potential abuser? I asked Ed Taylor and others, and they assured me that behind that rough exterior, underneath that roaring lion, was a very gentle and caring person. I would have nothing to fear as long as I did my job. I should never hide a problem from him, advice which I followed. Dick placed his confidence in me, and I worked hard never to disappoint him.

I remember the day on which a magnet coil was seriously damaged because of an error I had made in the magnet protection interlock system. There I was in the presence of Dick and Pief, like a dog with its tail between his legs. The consequence was that the experiment was delayed by a few weeks. But there were no recriminations, and I was allowed to continue. I never repeated that mistake.

I never regretted my decision to come to work for Dick Taylor. When people ask me about my work at SLAC, I tell them that it was a pleasure to help build the toys that Nobel Prize winners like Dick Taylor used in their work.

Cherrill Spencer:

I was a lowly postdoc during the four and a half years I spent at SLAC from 1974 to 1979 and so didn't get to speak to the experimental group leaders such as Professor Taylor very much.

But I did enjoy the parties that were held. In later years, when I was working at SLAC as its magnet engineer, one of them won a Nobel Prize.

I took these photos at Dick Taylor's Nobel Prize party on 17th October 1990.

I did enjoy friendships with our SLAC library staff, and Rita Taylor was amongst them, and I am glad to be able to share these photos with her.

Louis Fayard:

Looking at Dick discussing with a young Yves Sirois just after his Nobel Prize...

Bill Atwood:

Dick Taylor was definitely “old school” in the ways of Drell, Feynman, Bjorken, Gell- Man, Fritsch, Cronin, Schwartz, Barish,… His quest was fundamental physics – finding out new stuff about the ways the universe works. He longed to see what was on the next page of discoveries and devoted his career to this.

I met Dick mid-June of 1970. Newly graduated from Caltech, my former boss/mentor Alvin Tolestrup had put in a good word for me with Dick, who subsequently wangled me a job in his Group A at SLAC. He was wearing a white dress shirt, open at the collar with khaki pants, the fashion at the time mimicking Feynman’s preferences. Right off the bat he warned me that my summer salary would be diminished substantially when I started at Stanford in the fall and there was nothing that could be done about that. Group A was a leader in the deep inelastic eP and eD scattering experiments and the problem of the day was disentangling the effects of nuclear motion in deuterons so that eN scattering could be extracted. I dove in and Dick soon after linked me up with Geoffrey West from the Physics Dept. In that first meeting Dick explained that he couldn't formally be my advisor due to a long-standing schism with the Physics Dept.: I would have to have a co-advisor from the Dept. He'd arrange for Mel Schwartz to play that role and so I was sent off to meet with Mel!

Dick's management style was quite horizontal. He once shared that Pief had advised him to put the effort into choosing the right people for a task, but then "don't stand over them and tell them how much milk to put in the mash potatoes!" His office was part of a cluster of three offices with a secretary's desk in a vestibule space connecting them. Hobey Destaebler occupied the building's corner office, post docs and visitors in the other small office, and Marilou Arnold was the secretary at the front door. Dick's office was by far the largest of the three. His door was always open and he welcomed chance interruptions and visits by group members. Monday noontime was brown-bag lunch day where all met in Dick's office to hash over current activities. Another memorable set of meetings in that office was the ritual of going through a paper prior to journal submission. Painfully, line-by-line the paper was read aloud and discussed. But you know, the articles emerged better from that process and indeed, everyone who was an author was familiar with every word! What a far cry from today's journal submissions with hundreds if not thousands of authors many having never read the paper!

In the late 1960's and 1970's the use of computers in HEP experiments was becoming dominant. There were no "screens" – touch or otherwise. Programs were kept on IBM punch cards in boxes and results from running programs produced mountains of tractor-drive computer paper, which we often used to "landscape" office space with temporary walls! Dick was from the era in HEP just prior to this evolution and to my knowledge he never actually wrote and ran a computer program. But he had several around him who would fill in the gap. Dick had staffed Group A with an abundance of IT folks: Les Cottrell, Sunny Sund, Connie Logg, Dick Early,... not to mention the Group A physicists all of whom were facile in programming.

Dick shared a trait with my grandmother: he often would explain or offer advice using an old adage. These are well known: "you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make ’em drink," "a stitch in time saves nine," and so on. One that Dick loved was "never under estimate the stupidity in the world, never over estimate the evil." Yes, such good advice – how often we take a random, stupid act as being somehow malevolent! And another: a person's station in the world is inversely proportional to the number of keys on their key ring – a president has none while a janitor has many.

Dick and I shared a love for fly-fishing. We kept trying to find ways to "go fishing" together. In my latter grad school years this took the form of "playing hooky" from the lab and heading over to the San Lorenzo River in Santa Cruz to try for steelhead. Boy, were we way out of league! We only had mountain stream appropriate gear – steelhead are BIG and strong. We made a half dozen such forays and never even had so much as a hit. We did on one occasion see a high-schooler lock into one over by Dave Dorfan's house – Whow! What a show that fish put on, throwing water bank–to-bank in the San Lorenzo. The kid quickly disappeared down stream chasing the enraged fish. We also tried to go to the Sierra's to try our luck. It was Dick and Rita and me and my then-wife Marilyn in Dick's Cadillac convertible. We hadn't really made definite plans and just headed east. We stopped at a few rivers in the foothills that were accessible from the road – but not much doing. Dick's successful fishing adventures remained limited to his trips to Canada and mine to my backpacking excursions in the Sierras.

I interacted with Dick regularly over my tenure of 30 years at SLAC. First as a grad student, then post-doc and ultimately staff. There were way too many interactions to chronicle here but a few of the memorable ones follow. In my fourth year in grad school, early, on Sunday morning November 11, 1974, Dick called me requesting I come to the lab a.s.a.p. Upon entering his office about 8 am he told me of the spectacular find at SPEAR the night before: a resonance so narrow that it had been missed in previous energy scans. And by dint of being narrow, it was huge once sitting right on top of it: over a thousand times the counting rate to that on either side! The lab was just a buzz of excitement in the days that followed. Wild theories tossed around by all. But in the end it was realized that the SU(2) partner to the strange quark had been found, cementing the foundations to what we now call the Standard Model.

One of the best experiments I was lucky enough to participate in was E122 – Charlie Prescott's deep inelastic scattering experiment looking for parity violation. Dick threw himself "whole-hog" into this. Dick was very conservative with respect to making claims about experimental results and helped devise many cross checks for this experiment. We all know the results: E122 found the parity violation predicted by the Weinberg-Salam-Gashow theory and did so very convincingly. WS- G were awarded the Nobel shortly there after.

An illustration of Dick's drive to create and invent, while also showing his conservatism came in conjunction with the Super Delco proposal for PEP in the late 1970's. Dick berated me that we 'just had to find a cheaper, better way to make large area, EM shower calorimeters.' I came up with the idea of using the new-on-the- scene wavelength shifting plastic technology to readout a sampling shower counter. I was hell-bent on drilling holes and sticking rods of wavelength shifter down throw the stack of lead plates and scintillator and not having a great deal of success when Prescott suggested to just do the simple thing and put a thin slab of shifter down one side. Then the struggle to see a MIP signal with cosmic rays and again Charlie to the rescue! We packed the entire setup into a pickup and headed for the C-Beam where EGRET was undergoing calibration runs in an positron beam line. We got permission to stick our prototype wave-bar shower counter into the beam and immediately saw we had a winner: every scope trace fell right on top of the previous! Excitedly we made the first energy resolution measurements and wanted to write a NIM article announcing this new technique. Dick, while elated that a solution to large area shower detectors had been found was completely against a formal journal article: we hadn't done the required homework, cross checks, and… on and on. This forced us to settle for a SLAC technical note. It never appeared in a journal. But plenty of others around the world took notice and copied the idea.

The last science interaction I will mention was in conjunction with the spawning of the GLAST project. Dick had become friends with Peter Michelson from the campus Physics Dept. and thought that Peter and I would make a good team. For more than a year after I returned from a sabbatical leave at CERN in the fall of 1990, Dick tried to find a way to get us onto a common project. Then EGRET was launch in April of 1991 and its success begged for a follow-on mission and this was Dick's opening. Peter was the Stanford PI on the EGRET experiment. Elliott Bloom, also from the early days of Group A, had branched out from traditional particle physics and joined an x-ray detector experiment to be launch by the Air Force as part of the USA Satellite. So a beachhead at SLAC existed for "particle – astrophysics." Dick got Peter to thinking that it would be a good idea to come up to SLAC to discuss with HEP experimental types how to make a "better" EGRET. And so Peter and I finally linked up in May 1992 and the GLAST project was born. Dick was an enormous supporter and was a co-author on the first paper detailing the basic GLAST concept. The grumbling both at SLAC and in the HEP community at-large over the appropriation of resources to this new area of science was considerable and Dick was one of our strongest supporters and defenders. It could easily be the case that GLAST, at least in its current form, would not have come to fruition without Dick.

My contacts with Dick became few after I left the lab in 2000. We occasionally met at social events. But I know he remained very excited and keen about the GLAST project and hoped for some big surprises. And why not: extending the light (in gamma rays) gathering power by a factor of more than a hundred in a little explored area… But you have to try.

Dick was a superb manager of science projects and people. He belonged to the physics world that I grew up in and was one of the most respected experimenters of the later half of the 20th century. We will all miss him.

Art McDonald, 2015 Physics Nobel Laureate:

My first meeting with Dick Taylor was back in the late 70's when I was developing a polarized electron source for a nuclear parity violation experiment of relevance to Z exchange between Up and Down Quarks, that was of interest for the Standard Model at the time. I knew that a GaAs photoemission source had been developed at SLAC and I contacted Dick to obtain some information about it. At the time I was working at the Chalk River Nuclear Labs in Ontario, Canada.

Although I had never met him before, Dick immediately suggested that I visit SLAC to be introduced to the scientists working on source development, particularly Charlie Sinclair. When I arrived, Dick was a great host, including having me to his home for dinner. He also went out of his way to make sure that I obtained all of the information that I needed to proceed with the project, including construction drawings for the SLAC source. We were intending to develop a high intensity continuous beam version of the source and so this was of some general interest at SLAC as we were extending their pulsed version but Dick was really just trying to help us with a fundamental science experiment.

The assistance that we received from Dick and Charlie was very valuable then and later. We proceeded to construct a source based on the SLAC drawings and achieved the high intensity polarized electron beam that we used to produce circularly polarized bremmstrahlung for the photodisintegration of deuterium. The experiment was a success and the source was further used at the MIT Linac after we completed our work.

I think that Dick was particularly pleased to be assisting an experiment based in Canada and followed our progress subsequently, as he did with the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) project. I met him a number of times thereafter and found that he was very knowledgeable and influential with regard to governmental support of basic science in Canada. He maintained many Canadian connections.

He phoned me when I subsequently won the Nobel Prize for the SNO experiment and was genuinely pleased to see the prize awarded for work done in Canada. He also gave me various pieces of advice about winning the Nobel Prize in his usual "gruff but heart of gold" approach to things. One of the best was: "Now the general public will assume that you know everything about everything. You don’t!" Another was: "One of the nicest aspects of it is that you will hear from many people that you haven't heard from since grade school". Another indication of Dick's pleasure in maintaining his old connections.

We have lost a unique individual and I am honored to be able to contribute to this memorial to a man that I respected very much.

Douglas Stairs:

I have always had great admiration for Dick Taylor as a scientist with landmark contributions to Particle Physics, particularly Deep-Inelastic e-p Scattering and past leadership in the design and construction of a unique and powerful spectrometer, so well conceived for its purpose. In speaking of this experiment, in private or in public, Dick was consistently generous and unstinting in his praise for the contributions of his colleagues at SLAC and at collaborating universities.

I had the pleasure to meet Dick in 1967 during his visit to BNL when, if I recall correctly, he was greatly interested in the details of every experiment, without ever mention his achievements at SLAC.

In later years we became distant friends, participating in several meetings at TRIUMF and NSERC reviews. In private meetings, to which I was sometimes a party, we were always impressed by his perceptive assessments of proposals and their proponents, often expressed in forceful language and manner. Dick was a much-honoured visitor to DESY during the years of the HERA experiments. During all these years when I came to know him quite well, he never once mentioned the difficulties he had faced, and overcame, as a student.

Dick Taylor will be remembered as one of the outstanding scientists of his generation, and a person of great integrity, supporting science and scientists in Canada and beyond.

IN 2 P3 and l'Universite Paris de Sud:  

un hommage a Pierre Lehmann (video featuring Dick Taylor and others...)

Ralph Nelson: