Leon Lederman
Nobel Prize-winning physicist who popularised science
Leon Lederman, whose ingenious experiments with particle accelerators deepened science’s understanding of the subatomic world, died on Wednesday in Rexburg, Idaho. He was 96. His wife, Ellen Carr Lederman, confirmed the death, at a care facility. She and Lederman, who had long directed the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago, had retired to eastern Idaho.
Early in his career Leon Lederman and two colleagues demonstrated there are at least two kinds of particles called neutrinos (there are now known to be three), a discovery honoured in 1988 with a Nobel Prize in physics.
For those baffled by such esoterica, Lederman was quick to sympathise. “‘The Two Neutrinos’ sounds like an Italian dance team,” he remarked in his Nobel banquet speech. But he was determined to spread the word about the importance of the science he loved:
“How can we have our colleagues in chemistry, medicine, and especially in literature share with us, not the cleverness of our research, but the beauty of the intellectual edifice, of which our experiment is but one brick?”
He used his share of the prize winnings (physicists Jack Steinberger and Melvin Schwartz were also awarded the Nobel in 1988) to buy a log house in Idaho, in the Teton Valley, where he would later retire. By that time he was known as a pre-eminent figure in both discovering new physics and explaining it to the rest of the world.“we’re teaching high school science in the wrong order – biology, chemistry and then, for 20 per cent of the students, eventually physics,” he told The New York Times in 1998. That, he contended, was upside down.
“The subjects are unrelated, to be learned and forgotten – in the order taken,” Lederman lamented. Much better, he said, would be to begin with physics, including a basic understanding of atoms. That would lay the groundwork for chemistry, in which atoms join to form molecules, and then biology, where the interaction of molecules gives rise to life. A curriculum like that, called Physics First, would reprise the history of the universe, Lederman said: “Atoms formed molecules, and the molecules formed things that crawled out of the ocean. And here we are, worrying about the whole thing!”
Joseph D Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab, said he considered Lederman “the best ambassador of physics to the general public since Einstein”. “Instead of intimidating people with fancy jargon and mathematical equations, Leon had the ability to convey the genuine joy and fun of doing science,” Lykken said in an interview.
Reaching for ways to make physics go down easier, he nicknamed the Higgs boson “the God particle,” to the consternation of some colleagues. That was also the name of his book – a popularisation of physics published in 1993 – written with science journalist Dick Teresi. “The publisher wouldn’t let us call it the Goddamn particle,” they wrote, noting how successfully the Higgs was eluding capture in particle accelerator experiments. Its existence was not established until 2012.
Leon Max Lederman was born on 15 July 1922, in Manhattan, where his parents, Morris and Minna, Jewish immigrants from Russia, ran a laundry business. Leon grew up in the Bronx and graduated from James Monroe High School in 1939 and City College of New York in 1943. His bachelor’s degree was in chemistry, but by then he was already finding himself drawn to physics.after serving in France during the Second World War with the Army Signal Corps, he entered the graduate school of physics at Columbia University, where he received his PH.D. in 1951. He was soon working at the school’s new particle accelerator, at the Nevis Laboratories in Irvington, New York.
In 1962, his experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island with Schwartz and Steinberger demonstrated the existence of two kinds of neutrinos. One is associated with the electron and another with its heavier cousin, the muon.
These discoveries ultimately helped form the scaffolding for the Standard Model, a crowning achievement of 20th-century physics. Everything is made from three families of subatomic particles, each of which also includes a pair of quarks. It was one of these – the bottom quark – that Lederman and his Fermilab team discovered in 1977.
After leaving Columbia, Lederman became director of Fermilab in 1979. There he oversaw the construction of the Tevatron, the most powerful accelerator of its day, capable of colliding particles at energies up to 1 trillion electronvolts. Probing deeper into the pieces of matter would require even more firepower, and throughout the 1980s Lederman was an avid promoter of government funding for the Superconducting Super Collider, which would have been the most powerful machine on the planet. The dream was dashed when Congress cancelled funding in 1993.
By then Lederman had retired from Fermilab to become a professor of physics at the University of Chicago. He also continued to promote science education. In 1992 he served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
He and his wife, Ellen, moved to Idaho just before his 90th birthday. Found to have dementia, he was advised by his doctors to live in peaceful surroundings. In 2015 the couple agreed to let an online auction company sell his Nobel Prize medal. The proceeds, $765,002 before taxes, were set aside for future medical expenses.