Newly married, he applied to work for a PhD degree at Stanford University, where he joined the High Energy Physics Laboratory.

[3] The experiments run at SLAC in the late 1960s and early 1970s involved scattering high-energy beams of electrons from protons and deuterons and heavier nuclei.

[13] These deep inelastic scattering results provided the first experimental evidence that the protons and neutrons were made up of point-like particles, later identified to be the up and down quarks that had previously been proposed on theoretical grounds.

[10][15] Taylor has received numerous awards and honours including: In May 2019, the announcement of the 1990 Nobel Prize for physics was featured on the season 2 finale of the TV series Young Sheldon.

"A Swedish Science Thing and the Equation for Toast" featured Sheldon Cooper as a child, listening to a short wave radio as the Nobel Prize was announced in Sweden.