14 Facts About James Bjorken

James Daniel "BJ" Bjorken was an American theoretical physicist.

James Bjorken was a Putnam Fellow in 1954, received a BS in physics from MIT in 1956, and obtained his PhD from Stanford University in 1959.

James Bjorken was emeritus professor in the SLAC Theory Group at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and was a member of the Theory Department of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

James Bjorken was awarded the Dirac Medal of the ICTP in 2004; and, in 2015, the Wolf Prize in Physics and the EPS High Energy and Particle Physics Prize.

James Bjorken's father, J Daniel Bjorken, was an immigrant from Sweden near Lake Siljan.

James Bjorken changed his surname from "Bjorken" to Bjorken upon arriving in the US; he moved to Chicago to work as an electrical engineer, which was where he met his future wife, Edith.

James Bjorken grew up in Chicago and enjoyed mathematics, chemistry, the French horn, and watching the Chicago Cubs play at Wrigley Field.

James Bjorken discovered in 1968 what is known as light-cone scaling, a phenomenon in the deep inelastic scattering of light on strongly interacting particles, known as hadrons : Experimentally observed hadrons behave as collections of virtually independent point-like constituents when probed at high energies.

James Bjorken discovered the James Bjorken sum rule, the prototypical QCD spin sum rule.

James Bjorken was among the first to point out the phenomena of jet quenching in heavy ion collisions in 1982.

The predictions of James Bjorken scaling were confirmed in the early late 1960s electroproduction experiments at SLAC, in which quarks were seen for the first time.

James Bjorken co-authored, with Sidney Drell, a classic companion volume textbook on relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum fields.

In 1967, James Bjorken married Joan Goldthwaite; they had two children and were married until her death in 1983.

James Bjorken died from melanoma at a care facility in Redwood City, California, on August 6,2024 at the age of 90.