Martin L. Perl, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, was awarded an honorary doctorate of science at commencement Sunday, June 14, 2009.
Perl was nominated for the honor by Jay Newman, the R. Gordon Gould Professor of Physics, and Michael Vineyard, the Frank and Marie Louise Bailey Professor of Physics.
A year after graduating in 1948 from Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, Perl became a chemical engineer for the General Electric Co. in Schenectady.
Working in the electron tube production factory led him to what he considers a major turning point in his life – taking atomic physics and advanced calculus at Union to deepen his understanding of electron vacuum tubes.
“I got to know a wonderful physics professor, Vladimir Rojansky,” Perl writes in his official biographical statement. “One day he said to me ‘Martin, what you are interested in is called physics, not chemistry!’ At the age of 23, I finally decided to begin the study of physics.”
Perl received his Ph.D. in 1955 from Columbia University, where he studied under Professor I.I. Rabi, winner of the 1944 Nobel Prize in physics. Perl spent eight years teaching physics at the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at Stanford in 1963, where is now a professor emeritus.
In 1975, while working with a research team at the Stanford Positron-Electron Asymmetric Ring, Perl discovered a new elementary particle, which he named the “tau.”
The tau lepton is a superheavy cousin of the electron, the carrier of electrical current in household appliances.
In 1995, Perl equaled the achievement of his mentor Rabi when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery.