Ridgewood Physicist Reflects On His Career, Nobel Prize Experience

RIDGEWOOD, NJ — David Coward's journey from Ridgewood to Sweden was one littered with questions.

Coward was part of a team of scientists who conducted experiments on protons and neutrons using electrons. The team of several people from Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was rewarded for its effort: Three of them, Jerome Friedman, Henry Kendall and Richard E. Taylor won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1990. The team proved the existence of quarks, subatomic particles that make up protons and neutrons.

"I'm delighted that we won," said Coward, now 82 and a physicist emeritus at Stanford. "When you perform experiments, 99 percent of time when you're wrong, It's because you made a mistake. We double checked our work and everyone came out with the same answers."

Friedman, Kendall and Taylor were the only ones to receive the prize because only three recipients may receive a prize, regardless of how many people actually performed the work.

"We tried something. We took an idea and we ran with it and that's what it's about," Coward said. "When you look back at what what we did, it was pretty impressive."

Coward's fascination with science began long before he earned his doctorate from Stanford in 1963. It began when he was a kid in Ridgewood.

"I was always interested in how things worked. I remember having a Schwinn bicycle and I took the wheels off and took the thing apart and put it back together," Coward said from his Colorado home. "In high school I developed the fundamental curiosity on how things worked, but I was asked the questions 'how are nuclei held together and 'why is matter stable?'"

Coward was honored for his accomplishments by Ridgewood High School when he was named a distinguished alumnus in 2012.

"Keep your antenna up. Listen to what the people say around you, because an off-hand remark can be very effective in setting you down a path you'd never think you'd go down," Coward said. "You never know what is going to light that spark within you."

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Photo: David Coward/Courtesy of David Coward