Martin L. Perl shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 for his work in the discovery of the third family of elementary particles. He named his discovery the tau lepton. Perl has been with Stanford University for most of his career and continues to work in basic research.
Martin Perl was born in 1927 in Brooklyn, NY. His father, Oscar Perl, owned a printing and advertising company. His mother was Fay Perl (Rosenthal). Perl's parents valued education and insisted on good grades. He graduated from high school at age 16. Perl equates his love of all things mechanical with his extreme enjoyment of playing with a cousin's Erector set as a child. He was also an avid reader of science books and magazines, and he enjoyed constructing toys and models.
The practical side of his immigrant parents encouraged Perl to study engineering in college. He was accepted at Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (now Polytechnic University) in the chemical engineering program. With the outbreak of WWII, Perl, still not 18, joined the Merchant Marines and was later drafted into the Army. He did return to college and received a degree in chemical engineering in 1948.
He accepted a job at General Electric as a chemical engineer, working on production efficiencies for electron tubes. Perl took courses at Union College in Schenectady to learn more about the devices and the science behind them. A profession there explained to him that his interests appeared to be in physics and not in chemistry. Perl altered the path of his life and enrolled in a graduate physics program at Columbia University in 1950.
He studied under I.I. Rabi who pushed students to be independent and find their own solutions. Perl learned to work carefully and always verify his research. Rabi preached the importance of fundamental research and encouraged Perl to work in the area of elementary particle physics. He received a Ph.D. in physics in 1955.
Perl accepted a postdoctoral research position at the University of Michigan working first with bubble chamber physics, then luminescent chamber and then spark chamber. In 1963, after 8 years in Ann Arbor, he accepted a position at Stanford University (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC)). Perl says he prefers to work in "uncrowded areas of physics", a practice he learned from Rabi.
I stay away from lines of research where many people are working, and in particular I stay away from lines of research where very smart and competent people are working. I find it more comfortable to work in uncrowded areas of physics. I caution the young scientist about this advice. Almost all the time the best experimenters and the most experimenters work in the most fruitful
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