OBITUARIES : Experimental Physicist Rodney L. Cool
Rodney L. Cool, an experimental physicist who helped establish that protons and neutrons are made up of subatomic particles called quarks, has died at age 68.
Cool, a professor of high-energy physics at Rockefeller University, died Saturday of cancer at New York Hospital, said Pam Johnson, a hospital administrator.
Cool was respected “for his scientific insight and also for his way of dealing with people,” said Konstantin Goulianos, a professor of experimental high-energy physics at Rockefeller. “He was extremely good at discussing problems and getting to the heart of things.”
Until the 1950s, neutrons, protons and electrons were thought to be the fundamental particles of nature.
But a series of experiments in the 1970s conducted by Cool and his colleagues at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva helped establish quarks as the building blocks of neutrons and protons.
(The particles were called quarks after a similar word used in the James Joyce epic “Finnegan’s Wake.”)
Quarks are bound together by an extremely strong force. Cool’s recent research at CERN had been directed toward probing the properties of that force.
Start your day right
Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
