Burton Richter is a physicist at Stanford University who was largely responsible for the design of the eight-billion electron-volt accelerator called the Stanford Positron-Electron Accelerating Ring (SPEAR). Designed to cause collisions between electrons and positrons at almost unprecedented energy levels, SPEAR allowed scientists to perform experiments in 1974 that resulted in the discovery of an entirely new and unexpected particle, which Richter named psi (). The discovery had revolutionary implications for particle physics; the lifetime of the psi-particle was many thousands of times longer than other particles, which indicated that it possessed a previously undiscovered property of matter. At almost the same time Richter made his discovery, Samuel C. C. Ting , working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), discovered the same particle using a different method. The two men were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1976.

Richter was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 22, 1931. He was...