The International Peace Foundation

Keynote Speaker

Prof. Jerome Isaac Friedman shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1990 with his colleague Prof. Henry W. Kendall and with Prof. Richard E. Taylor. The award was made in recognition of "their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics".

From the beginning of the 20th century, scientists had sought to explore the internal structure of atoms. Great progress was made in the pioneering work of Prof. Ernest Rutherford's team, the discovery of the neutron by Prof. James Chadwick and the breakdown of the atomic nucleus into protons and neutrons by Heisenberg. In the 1950s and 1960's the introduction of new types of accelerators and particle detectors led to the discovery of a multitude of particles, the so-called hadrons, which in turn led to a new model for the systematic organization of the hadrons. The success of this model pointed to the possibility that hadrons, including protons and neutrons, are made up of point-like constituents, called quarks that have fractional electric charges of +2/3 and -1/3.

Professors Friedman, Kendall and Taylor experimentally studied the internal structures of the neutron and proton with the equivalent of a very high power electron microscope. When they accelerated electrons in the SLAC electron linear accelerator to 20 billion electron volts and "shot" them on to a liquid hydrogen target, the surprisingly wide scattering angle suggested that the proton could not be homogeneous, but had to consist of an internal substructure consisting of spin 1/2 point-like constituents that were identified as quarks. These experiments, along with neutrino scattering measurements at CERN, also demonstrated the existence of fields of force that bind the quarks together to form nucleons. This electrically neutral "glue" is referred to as gluons. The laureates' observations confirmed the quarks as a physical reality, the existence of which had been predicted by American physicists Prof. Murray Gell-Mann and Prof. George Zweig at Caltech in 1964. According to experimental observations, more than 99% of the mass of the matter on earth consists of quarks and their gluons and less than a tenth of one percent consists of electrons.

Born in Chicago, Jerome Friedman excelled in art, but became interested in physics after reading a book on relativity written by Albert Einstein. He turned down a scholarship at the Art Institute of Chicago and studied physics at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Prof. Enrico Fermi (B.A. in 1950, M.S. in 1953, Ph. D. in 1956). He continued his research career in the Physics Department of the University of Chicago, then went to join the High Energy Physics Laboratory at Stanford University in California (1957-60) and subsequently to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, where he became Assistant Professor and in 1967 Full Professor of Physics. He was the Director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science at MIT and headed the Physics Department there from 1980 to 1988. He returned to full-time teaching and research in 1988 and is currently an Emeritus Institute Professor at MIT.

Professor Friedman is a Member of the Advisory Board of the International Peace Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and AAAS. He has been a member of numerous advisory committees for the US Department of Energy and various laboratories and universities in the US and other countries. He currently serves on the boards of the STS Forum and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology as well as the MIT Technology Review.

SCHEDULE

Monday, March 6, 2017:

10:00 Dialogue with high school students at the Australian International School in Singapore
(not a public event)

Wednesday, March 8, 2017:

14:00 Keynote speech and dialogue at the State University of Jakarta (Universitas Negeri Jakarta)
Information and free seat reservation: phone (021) 489-3982, fax (021) 489-6977, email pr4@unj.ac.id

Friday, March 10, 2017:

14:00 Keynote speech and dialogue at Petra Christian University in Surabaya
Information and free seat reservation: phone (031) 298-3185, fax (031) 849-2583, email ka-bakp@petra.ac.id