Scientist who won the Nobel prize in physics for his work on the neutrino
A Life Story Leon Lederman
Leon Lederman, who has died aged 96, was a physicist who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize for his work on the neutrino, one of the elementary particles. He was also noted for describing the Higgs boson as ‘‘the God Particle’’ in his popular 1993 science book of that name.
The Higgs boson was named for the British physicist Peter Higgs, who first conceived of the particle, and its associated Higgs field – which interacts with particles to give them mass – in 1964. Its existence was finally confirmed, after half a century of research, in 2013.
Lederman said he came up with the term
‘‘God Particle’’ – which Higgs regarded as sensationalist – because ‘‘the publisher wouldn’t let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing.’’
He won the Nobel Prize, along with two Columbia University colleagues, Jack Steinberger and Melvin Schwarz, for the discovery in the 1960s that there are at least two kinds of neutrino. ‘‘ ‘The Two Neutrinos’ sounds like an Italian dance team,’’ he joked in his acceptance speech.
Leon Max Lederman was born in New York in 1922; his father was a Russian Jewish immigrant who worked in a laundry and had a passion for learning that he instilled in his son. Leon graduated in Chemistry from the City College of New York, then served in the US Army Signals Corps during World War II.
He received a doctorate in Particle Physics from Columbia in 1951, and began working at the university’s new particle accelerator. One of his early breakthroughs occurred there in 1957 when he and colleagues proved a previously controversial theory that the weak nuclear force, which powers radioactivity, violated a law of physics known as the conservation of parity.
He later described the thrill of making such a discovery: ‘‘You’re out in a lonely spot somewhere, looking at the numbers on reams of paper spewing out of a computer. You look and look, and suddenly you see some numbers that aren’t like the rest – a spike in the data. You apply some statistical tests and look for errors, but no matter what you do, the spike’s still there. It’s real. You’ve found something. There’s just no feeling like it in the world.’’
He was made a full professor at Columbia in 1958. In 1962, with Schwarz and Steinberger, he demonstrated that one kind of neutrino is associated with the electron, while another is associated with the muon. (We now know that there is also a third, associated with the tau.)
The discovery helped establish the Standard Model of particle physics, and eventually won the trio the Nobel Prize. Lederman used his share of the winnings to buy a log cabin in Idaho, where he eventually retired.
In 1979 he took a sabbatical from Columbia to become director at Fermilab, near Chicago, where he had already carried out ground-breaking research, discovering another elementary particle, the bottom quark. At various times he also taught at the University of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Noted for his sense of humour, he had, he said, ‘‘a terror of taking myself seriously’’. He was an enthusiastic populariser of science, and believed that physics should be the first of the sciences to be taught, laying the groundwork for chemistry and biology.
Though he was an atheist, he explained that when he was asked where the laws of nature spring from, ‘‘I usually say, ‘Go across the street to the theology school and ask those guys, because I don’t know.’’’
Leon Lederman married, first, Florence Gordon. They had two daughters and a son but divorced, and in 1981 he married Ellen Carr. She survives him, along with his children.
He was an enthusiastic populariser of science, and believed that physics should be the first of the sciences to be taught, laying the groundwork for chemistry and biology.