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Tuesday February 16 3:24 AM ET Nobel Physics Winner Henry Kendall Dies At 72 CRAWFORDVILLE, Fla. (Reuters) - Henry Kendall, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and pioneer of the environmental movement among scientists, died in Florida Monday while exploring the nature he fought to preserve. Kendall, 72, was taking photographs on a scuba dive with the National Geographic Society at the Wakulla Springs State Park when fellow divers found him lying unconscious on the bottom in shallow water, said Capt. Gene McCarthy of the Wakulla County Sheriff's Department. ``He was flown by life flight to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead,'' McCarthy said. Kendall, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shared the 1990 Nobel Prize for Physics with Jerome Friedman and Richard Taylor. The three were the first to observe traces of quarks, sub-atomic particles thought to form the basis of 99 percent of all matter. The cause of death was not known and an autopsy was scheduled for Tuesday morning, McCarthy said. Kendall was a founding member, and chairman since 1973, of the Union of Concerned Scientists. The group advocates a greater emphasis on applying scientific research to environmental and social problems and has campaigned widely on issues ranging from global warming to nuclear safety. In 1992, Kendall wrote and spearheaded the World Scientists' Warning to Humanity, in which some 1,700 of the world's leading researchers appealed for an end to the destruction of the Earth's natural resources. ``Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course,'' he wrote in the document. ``If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society ... and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know.'' Kendall earned a Ph.D. in nuclear and atomic physics from MIT in 1954. He taught at Stanford University from 1956 to 1961 before returning to MIT. He wrote numerous books, including ``The Fallacy of Star Wars,'' ``Beyond the Freeze: The Road to Nuclear Sanity,'' and ''Energy Strategies: Toward a Solar Future.''
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