Beyond Smoke and Mirrors

Burton Richter was born in Brooklyn, New York on March 22, 1931. He received a bachelor's degree in physics in 1952 and a doctorate degree in physics in 1956 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined Stanford University's High-Energy Physics Lab as a research associate and became an assistant professor of physics in 1960. In 1963, he also took a position at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, one of the leading particle physics laboratories in the world. He was the laboratory director from 1984 to 1999.

Richter and Samuel C. C. Ting received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1976 for discovering new particle they named J/psi. This finding revealed a new building block of matter. Richter's book, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Climate Change and Energy in the 21st Century, was published in 2010. In 2014, he received the National Medal of Science. He died from heart failure on July 18, 2018 at the age of 87.

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