Unknown author · Public domain

Won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the tau lepton, a heavy, unstable cousin of the electron whose existence implied a third generation of fundamental particles that physicists had not anticipated. Trained first as a chemical engineer, he worked at General Electric before turning to particle physics, spending most of his research career at Stanford's linear accelerator. The tau's discovery, built up from statistical evidence across thousands of particle collisions rather than a single clean signal, took years to be widely accepted.