Rodney Lee Cool (March 8, 1920 – April 16, 1988) was an American physicist who helped to establish the existence of the quark. [1] [2] Cool was a professor of high-energy physics at Rockefeller University,[2] a member of the National Academies of Sciences.[1][3] He was also a Fellow of the American Physical Society.[2] Cool founded an experimental physics group at Rockefeller University in 1970.[2]
Cool graduated with a bachelor's degree from the University of South Dakota and received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University.[2] He also worked at European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva. There he and his colleagues performed experiments that showed the quark to be a building block of neutrons and protons.[1][2]