boston

Kendall: an activist as well as an academic. Credit: DONNA COVENEY/MIT

Henry Kendall — professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Nobel laureate and a tireless political activist — died last week while scuba diving in a Florida lake. He was 72 years old.

Kendall was an experienced deep-sea diver who had written books on the subject and designed underwater cameras. He had been photographing Wakulla Springs, the world's largest freshwater springs, accompanying a team of divers from the National Geographic Society.

Members of this team found him unconscious in shallow water a few feet from shore and took him to hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. The cause of death is unknown, but his diving equipment is being tested to see if it malfunctioned.

Kendall received the Nobel prize for physics in 1990 with his MIT colleague Jerome Friedman and Richard Taylor of Stanford University for work at Stanford in the late 1960s and early 1970s that provided the first direct evidence for quarks.

In electron-scattering experiments, they showed that protons and neutrons were ‘lumpy’, with point-like substructures in their interior consistent with the quark model independently proposed in 1964 by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig. The finding paved the way for the Standard Model of physics.

Kendall will also be remembered for his activities on many political and environmental fronts. A co-founder of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), and its chairman since 1973, he was one of the first scientists to reveal safety flaws in the design and operation of nuclear power plants. He also warned against an unchecked nuclear arms race, and fought the ‘Star Wars’ defence initiative and space-based weapons.

Kendall co-authored books on energy policy, arms control, nuclear war and the fallacy of missile defence. More recently, he urged the adoption of measures to curb global warming — a subject on which he briefed President Bill Clinton in 1997.

“He always saw the big picture,” says Friedman. Howard Ris, UCS executive director, says that Kendall “firmly believed that scientists could — and should — play an important role in public policy debates. His leadership ⃛ was deeply rooted in the belief that, given accurate and credible information, the public and policymakers would, ultimately, make the right choices about the future.”