The American Physical Society awarded former UC Santa Cruz physicist Michael Riordan on October 15 with its Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics, citing his “important contributions to the history of post-World War II physics, including the discovery of quarks, the invention and development of the transistor, and the search for the Higgs boson.”
Riordan did most of his work on the history of the Higgs boson while serving as an adjunct professor of physics at UC Santa Cruz, where he taught courses on conceptual physics and the history of 20th century physics.
Riordan earned his Ph.D. in physics in 1973 from MIT, working as a graduate student and postdoctoral researcher on the team credited with the discovery of quarks.
He subsequently pursued research in experimental high-energy physics at the University of Rochester and at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in the 1980s. The following decade, he took up the history of physics and technology, teaching the history of 20th century physics at Stanford.
Riordan was also cited for “making these stories interesting and accessible to both non-academic and academic readers.” He wrote The Hunting of the Quark, for which he won the American Institute of Physics’ Science Writing Award in 1988, and co-authored
Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age, widely regarded as the definitive history of the invention of the transistor. His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and many other newspapers and magazines.
Established in 2005, the Abraham Pais Prize recognizes outstanding scholarly achievements in the history of physics and is awarded annually, consisting of $10,000 and a certificate citing the recipient’s contributions. Awardees also deliver an invited lecture as part of the honor.
For more about Riordan, please see the October 15 article in Symmetry magazine, “A first-person view of physics history.”
