| Samuel Chao Chung Ting | |
|---|---|
| Born | January 27, 1936 Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions | CERN Columbia University MIT |
| Alma mater | University of Michigan |
| Doctoral advisor | L.W. Jones, M.L. Perl |
| Known for | Discovery of the J/ψ particle |
| Notable awards | Nobel Prize for Physics (1976) Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award (1976) De Gasperi Award (1988), |
Samuel Chao Chung Ting (Chinese: 丁肇中; pinyin: Dīng Zhàozhōng; Wade-Giles: Ting¹ Chao⁴-chung¹) (born January 27, 1936) is an American physicist who received the Nobel Prize in 1976, with Burton Richter, for discovering the subatomic J/ψ particle. He is the principal investigator for the $1.5 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer project scheduled for installation on the International Space Station in 2010.
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Samuel Ting was born on January 27, 1936, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ting's ancestry is Rizhao (日照縣), Shandong, China. His parents, Kuan-hai Ting (丁觀海) and Tsun-ying Jeanne Wang (王雋英), met as graduate students in Michigan and moved back to the warring China when Samuel Ting was an infant. As a result, Samuel Ting's formal childhood education had been discontinuous and sporadic, and he was mostly home-schooled by his parents, who later became professors of science and psychology, respectively, at National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan. His formal education began at twelve at the prestigious Provincial Chien-Kuo High School (建國中學, now Municipal Taipei Chien-Kuo Senior High School) in Taipei. After high school, he studied one year at National Cheng Kung University, Tainan City.
When Ting returned to the United States in his twenties, he studied engineering, mathematics and physics at the University of Michigan. In 1959 he was awarded BAs in both mathematics and physics, and in 1962 he earned a doctorate in physics. In 1963 he worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which would later become CERN. From 1965 he taught at Columbia University, and worked at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Germany. Since 1969 Ting has been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Ting is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and an academician of Taiwan's Academia Sinica.
In 1976 Ting was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with Burton Richter of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center for the discovery of the J/ψ meson nuclear particle. They were chosen for the award, in the words of the Nobel committee, "for their pioneering work in the discovery of a heavy elementary particle of a new kind".[1] The discovery was made in 1974 when Ting was heading a research team at the Brookhaven National Laboratory exploring new regimes of high energy particle physics.[2]
Ting gave his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Mandarin. Although there had been Chinese recipients before (Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang), none had previously delivered the acceptance speech in Chinese. In his speech, Ting emphasized that the importance of experimental work equals that of theoretical work.
In 1995, not long after the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider project had severely reduced the possibilities for experimental high-energy physics on Earth, Ting proposed the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a space-borne cosmic-ray detector. The proposal was accepted and he became the principal investigator and has been directing the development since then. A prototype, AMS-01, was flown in space on shuttle mission STS-91 in 1998. The main follow-on mission, AMS-02, was then planned for launch by the U.S. space shuttle and mounting on the International Space Station.[3]
This project is a massive $1.5 billion undertaking involving 500 scientists from 56 institutions and 16 countries. After the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, NASA announced that the Space Shuttle was to be retired by 2010 and the AMS-02 was not on the manifest of any of the remaining shuttle flights. Dr. Ting was forced to lobby congress and the public to secure an additional space shuttle flight dedicated to this project. Also during this time, Ting has had to deal with numerous technical problems in fabricating and qualifying the large, sensitive and delicate detector module for space. AMS-02 is manifested for launch on space shuttle mission STS-134 in July of 2010.[4]
In 1960 Ting married Kay Kuhne, and together have two daughters, Jeanne Ting Chowning and Amy Ting. Jeanne is the Director of Education at the Northwest Association for Biomedical Research. Amy is an artist. Since 1985 he has been married to Dr. Susan Carol Marks, and they have one son, Christopher, who is currently a consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton in Washington, DC.
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