Leon Max Lederman, Nobel Prize for his research on neutrinos

15 July 1922, New York (USA) - 3 October 2018, Rexburt (USA)

He graduated in chemistry from New York University in 1943 and received his PhD in physics from Columbia University in 1951.

In 1956, Chien-Shiung Wu demonstrated the lack of parity conservation in the weak interaction, i.e. his experiment allowed to observe a large asymmetry in the direction of the beta emission, correlated with the direction of the polarising field. He shared the results with his colleagues at Columbia, Leon Lederman, Richard Lawrence Garwin, and Marcel Weinrich, who modified Wu's experiment at the cyclotron verifying the theory of parity violation in weak interactions. The two teams agreed and published their papers in the Physical Review in 1957.

In 1958 he began teaching at Columbia University and directed its Physics Research Laboratory from 1961 to 1978. In 1960, on leave from Columbia, he spent time at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva as a Ford Foundation Fellow.

His scientific research focused, together with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, on a method of detecting neutrinos that allowed the double structure of leptons to be demonstrated. This discovery enabled theorists to develop a scheme, known as the standard model, for the classification of all elementary particles.

In 1962, they discovered the muonic neutron and, in 1977, succeeded in detecting a new quark particle, the bottom quark.

From 1979 to 1989 he directed the government research laboratory, Fermi National Laboratory (Fermilab) in the United States. During his mandate, in 1977, a group of physicists, the ‘E288 Experimental’ team, led by Lederman, announced that the Fermilab particle accelerator was producing a particle with a mass of about 6.0 GeV. After getting more data, the group discovered that this particle did not exist, and the ‘discovery’ was called ‘Oops-Leon’ as a pun on the original name and Lederman's first name.

As director of Fermilab, he was a leading advocate of the ‘Superconducting Super Collider’ project, among many others, and oversaw the construction of the Tevatron, for decades the world's highest energy particle collider.

In 1986 he founded the Academy of Mathematics and Science in Aurora, Illinois, where he was a resident scholar from 2012 until his death.

In 1988, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, together with Schartz and Steinberger, for their work on the neutrino.

In 1989, he resigned from his position to become a professor at the University of Chicago briefly and then moved to the Illinois Institute of Technology.

In 1993, Lederman published a popular science book that catapulted him to fame. It was entitled ‘The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?’ and although he didn't agree with the title either (he had called it the ‘damn particle’), it was the one that gave its name to the discovery that, in 2012, scientists at CERN would make. They announced that they had finally caught the Higgs boson, a singular particle that gave clues about the appearance of matter after the Big Bang and that would be one of the keys to finding a way to establish a theory capable of explaining nuclear, gravitational, and electromagnetic phenomena.

He was an early supporter of the 2008 Science Debate, an initiative to get then-presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain to discuss the country's major science policy challenges.

In 2011, Lederman began to suffer memory loss and the accumulation of medical bills led him to sell his Nobel Prize for $765,000 in 2015 to cover the costs. He died from complications of dementia on 3 October 2018, in Rexburg, Idaho, at the age of 96.

Lederman served as president of the American Physical Society and on the Board of Patrons of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist and was on the board of trustees of the Science Service, now known as the Society for Science and the Public.

He was active in the ‘Physics First’ movement, also known as ‘Right-side Up Science’ and ‘Biology Last’, which seeks to reorganise the current high school science curriculum so that physics precedes chemistry and biology.

He also received the National Medal of Science (1965), the Elliot Cresson Medal in Physics (1976), and the Wolf Prize in Physics, together with Martin Lewis Perl, for his research on quarks and leptons (1982) and, in 1988, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, together with M. Schwartz and J. Steinberger, for their work on the neutrino. Enrico Fermi Prize (1992), the Chicago History Museum's ‘Making History’ Award (1995) for Distinction in Science, Medicine, and Technology, and the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award.