Richard Taylor, Stanford physicist who won Nobel Prize for discovering quarks, dies at 88

Shortly after learning he'd won the Nobel Prize in physics, Richard Taylor stared at his reflection in a mirror.

"Murray Gell-Mann is smart. Dick Garwin is smart," he told himself, referring to two pioneering 20th-century physicists. "You are lucky."

The self-effacing Taylor, a Stanford University professor emeritus of physics who shared the Nobel in 1990 for his role in the discovery of quarks, died at his home on the Stanford campus last month. He was 88.

Taylor's experiments with the university-operated SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in its early days revealed the existence of quarks, the elusive building blocks of the proton, neutron and other subatomic particles.

The discovery set the foundations for the Standard Model, which describes