The physicist Martin Perl, who has died aged 87, won the Nobel prize in 1995 for his discovery of the tau lepton, a heavy version of the electron. A lifelong liberal, and active opponent of the Vietnam war, he was an individualist in a field experimental particle physics where large teams have become the norm. His philosophy was summed up by his son, Jed, who said: He always advocated that you should look at what the crowd is doing and go in a different direction.
Perl was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Jewish immigrants from what was then the Polish part of Russia. He graduated from James Madison high school, Brooklyn, at the age of 16. And although he had won a physics prize, he had no plans to become a scientist. Instead, he took up chemical engineering, and enrolled at Brooklyn Polytechnic.
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