Leon M. Lederman

Leon M. Lederman

Lederman on May 11, 2007
Born Leon Max Lederman
(1922-07-15) July 15, 1922
New York City, New York, U.S.
Residence United States
Nationality United States
Fields Physics
Institutions Columbia University
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Illinois Institute of Technology
Alma mater City College of New York
Columbia University
Known for Seminal contributions to neutrinos, bottom quark
Notable awards Nobel Prize in Physics (1988)
Wolf Prize in Physics (1982)
National Medal of Science (1965)
Vannevar Bush Award (2012)
William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement (1991)
Spouse Florence Gordon (3 children)
Ellen Carr[1]

Leon Max Lederman (born July 15, 1922) is an American experimental physicist who received, along with Martin Lewis Perl, the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982, for their research on quarks and leptons, and the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1988, along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, for their research on neutrinos. He is Director Emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, USA. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, in Aurora, Illinois in 1986, and has served in the capacity of Resident Scholar since 1998.[2] In 2012, he was awarded the Vannevar Bush Award for his extraordinary contributions to understanding the basic forces and particles of nature.[3]

Early life and career

Lederman was born in New York City, New York, the son of Minna (née Rosenberg) and Morris Lederman, a laundryman.[4] Lederman graduated from the James Monroe High School in the South Bronx. He received his bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1943, and received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1951. He then joined the Columbia faculty and eventually became Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics. In 1960, on leave from Columbia, he spent some time at CERN in Geneva as a Ford Foundation Fellow.[5] He took an extended leave of absence from Columbia in 1979 to become director of Fermilab. Resigning from Columbia (and retiring from Fermilab) in 1989 to teach briefly at the University of Chicago, he then moved to the physics department of the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he currently serves as the Pritzker Professor of Science. In 1991, Lederman became President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Lederman is also one of the main proponents of the "Physics First" movement. Also known as "Right-side Up Science" and "Biology Last," this movement seeks to rearrange the current high school science curriculum so that physics precedes chemistry and biology.

A former president of the American Physical Society, Lederman also received the National Medal of Science, the Wolf Prize and the Ernest O. Lawrence Medal. Lederman serves as President of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He also served on the board of trustees for Science Service, now known as Society for Science & the Public, from 1989 to 1992, and is a member of the JASON defense advisory group.[6]

Among his achievements are the discovery of the muon neutrino in 1962 and the bottom quark in 1977. These helped establish his reputation as among the top particle physicists.

In 1977, a group of physicists led by Leon Lederman announced that a particle with a mass of about 6.0 GeV was being produced by the Fermilab particle accelerator. The particle's initial name was the greek letter Upsilon (\Upsilon\,). After taking further data, the group discovered that this particle did not actually exist, and the "discovery" was named "Oops-Leon" as a pun on the original name (mispronounced /ˈjuːpsᵻlɒn/) and Lederman's first name.

As the director of Fermilab and subsequent Nobel physics prizewinner, Leon Lederman was a very prominent early supporter – some sources say the architect[7] or proposer[8] – of the Superconducting Super Collider project, which was endorsed around 1983, and was a major proponent and advocate throughout its lifetime.[9][10] Lederman later wrote his 1993 popular science book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? – which sought to promote awareness of the significance of such a project – in the context of the project's last years and the changing political climate of the 1990s.[11] The increasingly moribund project was finally shelved that same year after some $2 billion of expenditure.[7]

In 1988, Lederman received the Nobel Prize for Physics along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger "for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino".[2] Lederman also received the National Medal of Science (1965), the Elliott Cresson Medal for Physics (1976), the Wolf Prize for Physics (1982) and the Enrico Fermi Award (1992).

In 1995, he received the Chicago History Museum "Making History Award" for Distinction in Science Medicine and Technology.

Lederman was an early supporter of Science Debate 2008, an initiative to get the then-candidates for president, Barack Obama and John McCain, to debate the nation's top science policy challenges. In October 2010, Lederman participated in the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Lunch with a Laureate program where middle and high school students got to engage in an informal conversation with a Nobel Prize-winning scientist over a brown-bag lunch.[12] Lederman was also a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Advisory Board [13] and CRDF Global.

Personal life

Lederman was born in New York to a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia.[14] His father operated a hand laundry while encouraging Leon to pursue his education. He went to elementary school in New York City, continuing on to college and his doctorate in the city.[15]

In his book,The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?, Lederman writes that, although he was a chemistry major, he became fascinated with physics, because of the clarity of the logic and the unambiguous results from experimentation. His best friend during his college years, Martin Klein, convinced him of "the splendors of physics during a long evening over many beers." After that conversation he became resolute and unwavering regarding his desire to pursue physics. When he joined the Army with a B.S. in Chemistry, he was determined to become a physicist following his service.[16]

After three years in the U.S. Army during World War II, he took up physics at Columbia University, and received his Masters in 1948. Lederman began his Ph.D research working with Columbia's Nevis synchro-cyclotron,[17] which was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world at that time.[16] Dwight D. Eisenhower, then the president of Columbia University, and future president of the United States, cut the ribbon dedicating the synchro-cyclotron in June 1950.[18] These atom smashers were just coming of age at this time and created the new discipline of particle physics.[16]

After receiving his Ph.D and then becoming a faculty member at Columbia University he was promoted to full professor in 1958.[19]

In "The God Particle" he once wrote "The history of atomism is one of reductionism – the effort to reduce all the operations of nature to a small number of laws governing a small number of primordial objects." [20] And this was the quest he undertook. This book shows that he pursued the quark, and hopes to find the Higgs boson. The top quark, which he and other physicists realized must exist according to the standard model, was, in fact, produced at Fermilab not long after this book was published.[21]

He is known for his sense of humor in the physics community.[22] On August 26, 2008 Lederman was video-recorded by a science focused organization called ScienCentral, on the street in a major U.S. city, answering questions from passersby.[23] He answered questions such as "What is the strong force?" and "What happened before the Big Bang?".

He has three children with his first wife, Florence Gordon, and now lives with his second wife, Ellen (Carr), in Driggs, Idaho.[24]

He is an atheist.[25][26]

Publications

Honorary degrees and awards

See also

References

  1. ↑ American Scientists - Charles W. Carey - Google Books
  2. 1 2 Lederman, Leon M. (1988). Frängsmyr, Tore; Ekspång, Gösta, eds. "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1988: Leon M. Lederman, Melvin Schwartz, Jack Steinberger". Nobel Lectures, Physics 1981–1990 (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co.). Retrieved 22 May 2012. External link in |journal= (help)
  3. ↑ National Science Board - Honorary Awards - Vannevar Bush Award Recipients
  4. ↑ Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier, and Megascience - Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne W. Kolb, Catherine Westfall - Google Books
  5. ↑ "CERN affiliated article by Lederman". Springer. Retrieved 11 June 2015.
  6. ↑ Horgan, John (April 16, 2006). "Rent-a-Genius". The New York Times.
  7. 1 2 ASCHENBACH, JOY (1993-12-05). "No Resurrection in Sight for Moribund Super Collider : Science: Global financial partnerships could be the only way to salvage such a project. But some feel that Congress delivered a fatal blow.". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 16 January 2013. Disappointed American physicists are anxiously searching for a way to salvage some science from the ill-fated superconducting super collider ... "We have to keep the momentum and optimism and start thinking about international collaboration," said Leon M. Lederman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who was the architect of the super collider plan
  8. ↑ Lillian Hoddeson; Adrienne Kolb. "Vision to reality: From Robert R. Wilson's frontier to Leon M. Lederman's Fermilab". arXiv:1110.0486. Lederman also planned what he saw as Fermilab's next machine, the Superconducting SuperCollider (SSC)
  9. ↑ Abbott, Charles (June 1987). "Illinois Issues journal, June 1987". p. 18. Lederman, who considers himself an unofficial propagandist for the super collider, said the SSC could reverse the physics brain drain in which bright young physicists have left America to work in Europe and elsewhere. (direct link to article: )
  10. ↑ Kevles, Dan. "Good-bye to the SSC" (PDF). California Institute of Technology "Engineering & Science". 58 no. 2 (Winter 1995): 16–25. Retrieved 16 January 2013. Lederman, one of the principal spokesmen for the SSC, was an accomplished high-energy experimentalist who had made Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the development of the Standard Model during the 1960s (although the prize itself did not come until 1988). He was a fixture at congressional hearings on the collider, an unbridled advocate of its merits []
  11. ↑ Calder, Nigel (2005). Magic Universe:A Grand Tour of Modern Science. pp. 369–370. The possibility that the next big machine would create the Higgs became a carrot to dangle in front of funding agencies and politicians. A prominent American physicist, Leon lederman, advertised the Higgs as The God Particle in the title of a book published in 1993 ...Lederman was involved in a campaign to persuade the US government to continue funding the Superconducting Super Collider... the ink was not dry on Lederman's book before the US Congress decided to write off the billions of dollars already spent
  12. ↑ Archived December 30, 2010, at the Wayback Machine.
  13. ↑ USA Science and Engineering Festival - Advisors
  14. ↑ Humes, Edward (2006), Over Here: How the G.I. Bill Transformed the American Dream, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, p. 275, ISBN 9780151007103.
  15. ↑ Lederman, Leon M. "Leon M. Lederman – Autobiography." http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1988/lederman-autobio.html Retrieved 06 April 2009. Published 1988, The Nobel Foundation.
  16. 1 2 3 The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question – page 5
    by Leon Lederman with Dick Teresi (copyright 1993) Houghton Mifflin Company
  17. ↑ see High Energy Physics section on this page: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/physics/news/DeptHistory/index/
  18. ↑ Eisenhower at ribbon cutting for the dedication of the Nevis synchro-cyclotron http://www.columbia.edu/cu/physics/images/columbia-cyclotron.jpeg
  19. ↑ The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question – page 296
    by Leon Lederman with Dick Teresi (copyright 1993) Houghton Mifflin Company
  20. ↑ The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question – page 87
    by Leon Lederman with Dick Teresi (copyright 1993) Houghton Mifflin Company
  21. ↑ Observation of Top Quark Production in [anti-p][and][p] Collisions with the Collider Detector at Fermilab http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v74/i14/p2626_1
  22. ↑ The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question – page 17 – by Leon Lederman with Dick Teresi (copyright 1993) Houghton Mifflin Company
  23. ↑ Street Corner Science with Leon Lederman,
    http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/08/26/street-corner-science-with-leon-lederman
  24. ↑ http://411.info/people/Idaho/Driggs/Lederman-Leon/132837548.html." http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1988/lederman-autobio.html Retrieved 29.7.2008. Published 1988, The Nobel Foundation.
  25. ↑ Dan Falk (2005). "What About God?". Universe on a T-Shirt: The Quest for the Theory of Everything. Arcade Publishing. p. 195. ISBN 9781559707336. "Physics isn't a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money." - Leon Lederman
  26. ↑ Babu Gogineni (July 10, 2012). "It’s the Atheist Particle, actually". Postnoon News. Retrieved 10 July 2012. Leon Lederman is himself an atheist and he regrets the term, and Peter Higgs who is an atheist too, has expressed his displeasure, but the damage has been done!
  27. ↑ Fermilab History and Archives Project | Leon M. Lederman Honorary Degrees and Awards

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