By demonstrating through experiment the reality of quarks, Taylor helped lay the foundation of what scientists know as the Standard Model of particle physics.
At the CERN Scientific Policy Committee meeting held on June 18-19, 1979, the construction of LEP, the Large Electron-Positron collider, was on the agenda.
The United States has contributed the energy and expertise of hundreds of scientists and engineers, and more than half a billion dollars to the construction of the LHC particle collider and two of its experiments at the European laboratory CERN.
Building the parts for the Large Hadron Collider has presented challenges but taught many lessons for both particle physics laboratories and their industry partners.
The Large Hadron Collider, to start up in late 2007, traces its inception back to 1979. There are already more than 4000 papers in the SPIRES database that are about the LHC, either mentioning its name in the title or referring to it in a significant way.
To deal with the computing demands of the LHC experiments, scientists have created the world's largest, most international distributed-computing system.
When the LHC collider and its experiments are being switched on in 2007, scientists around the world will be eager to monitor the start-up in real time. But physicists won't have to be at the LHC site to monitor the hardware they built or to determine what tuning they need to do.