Canadian physicist who in 1990 shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Jerome Friedman (Friedman, Jerome Isaac) and Henry Kendall (Kendall, Henry Way) for his collaboration in proving the existence of quarks (quark), which are now generally accepted as being among the basic building blocks of matter.

Taylor attended the University of Alberta, where he received his bachelor's degree (1950) and his master's degree (1952). He received his doctorate from Stanford University in 1962. He worked for a year at the University of California's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and from 1962 to 1968 he was a staff member at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).

While at SLAC, he and Friedman and Kendall conducted the series of experiments that confirmed the hypothesis that protons and neutrons are made up of quarks. This discovery was crucial to the formulation of the currently accepted theoretical description of matter and its interactions, known as the standard model. Taylor became an associate professor at Stanford in 1968 and a full professor in 1970.