Henry Kendall

Henry W. Kendall

Henry W. Kendall was a Nobel Laureate and co-founder of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). The Union of Concerned Scientists' "Kendall Science Fellowships" is named after Henry Kendall.

About

From the Union of Concerned Scientists website:

In 1950, Kendall entered MIT’s School of Physics, where he got his PhD. He spent two years as a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT and the Brookhaven National Laboratory before joining the physics faculty at Stanford. At Stanford, Kendall met the two men with whom he would share the Nobel Prize in Physics, Jerome Friedman and Richard Taylor.

Five years later, Kendall returned to MIT as a faculty member and reestablished his collaboration with Friedman, who had moved to MIT a year earlier, and Taylor, who was group leader at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). Their joint Nobel Prize was awarded in 1990 “for 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.”

In 1969 Kendall was one of the faculty members who played a critical role in the founding of UCS following a teach-in organized by a group of scientists and students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to protest the militarization of scientific research and to promote science in the public interest. For the remainder of his life, Kendall was active in the work of UCS, serving as longtime chair of the UCS board and always pushing the organization to innovate, to take risks, and to never be satisfied with the status quo.

Influenced by Karl T. Compton

Although a poor student, Henry Kendall was encouraged by "family friend and then President of MIT" Karl T. Compton to apply to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1990, he discussed his personal history and the founding of the Union of Concerned Scientists:

"On the urging of Karl Compton, a family friend and then President of MIT, I applied for, and was accepted at that institution’s school of physics in 1950. The years at graduate school were a continuing delight – the first sustained immersion in science at a full professional level. My thesis, carried out under the supervision of Martin Deutsch, was an attempt to measure the Lamb shift in positronium, a transient atom discovered by Deutsch a few years before. The attempt was unsuccessful but it served as a very interesting introduction to electromagnetic interactions and the power of the underlying theory.

[...]

At the start of the 1960s, troubled by the massive build-up of the superpower’s nuclear arsenals, I joined a group of academic scientists advising the U.S. Defense Department. The opportunity to observe the operation of the Defense establishment from the “inside,” both in the nuclear weapons area and in the counterinsurgency activities that later expanded to be the U.S. military involvement in South East Asia proved a valuable experience, helpful in later activities in the public domain. It was clear that changing unwise Government policies from inside, especially those the Government is deeply attached to, involves severe, often insurmountable, problems.

In 1969, I was one of a group founding the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), and have played a substantial role in its activities in the years hence. UCS is a public interest group, supported by funds raised from the general public, that presses for control of technologies which may be harmful or dangerous. The organization has had an important national role in the controversies over nuclear reactor safety, the wisdom of the US Strategic Defense Initiative, the B2 (Stealth) bomber, and the challenge posed by fossil fuel burning and possible greenhouse warming of the atmosphere, among others. I have been Chairman of the organization since 1974...

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

As at April 1984, Henry Kendall served on the Board of Directors for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists journal.