James Bjorken

James Daniel Bjorken, known as BJ, was an American theoretical physicist who lived from 1934 to 2024, who discovered light-cone scaling, known as Bjorken scaling, in 1968, showing that hadrons behave as collections of virtually independent point-like constituents when probed at high energies, an observation instrumental in recognizing quarks as actual elementary particles and leading to quantum chromodynamics; he also developed the Bjorken sum rule and identified jet quenching in heavy ion collisions. He received the Heineman Prize in 1972, the E. O. Lawrence Award in 1977, the Pomeranchuk Prize in 2000 and the ICTP Dirac Medal in 2004. He received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 2015.