James Bjorken
James Bjorken (often known as "BJ") is a prominent theoretical physicist. He discovered light-cone scaling, a phenomenon in the deep inelastic scattering of light on hadrons. In 1964, ten years before the first experimental evidence for the charm quark emerged in the November Revolution of 1974, Bjorken and fellow physicist Sheldon Glashow predicted its existence and named it "charm."
Bjorken received his undergraduate degree from MIT in 1956 and his PhD in physics from Stanford University in 1959. He served on the faculty of Stanford University until 1979, when he joined Fermilab as Associate Director for Physics. He wrote his most highly-cited paper, "Highly Relativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions: The Central Rapidity Region" in 1982, while he was at Fermilab. He remained at Fermilab until 1989, when he joined SLAC as a theoretical physicist. During the 1990s, he was a co-spokesperson for the Tevatron experiment T-864. He retired in 1998 and passed away in 2024.
James Bjorken Content
- Fermilab Colloquium [by Bjorken] Today — February 18, 2004
James Bjorken in 1981