Obituaries

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Great physicist.

Leon Max Lederman (July 15, 1922 – October 3, 2018) was an American experimental physicist who received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982, along with Martin Lewis Perl, 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.

Lederman was Director Emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, in Aurora, Illinois in 1986, and was Resident Scholar Emeritus there from 2012 until his death in 2018.[2][3]
An accomplished scientific writer, he became known for his book The God Particle establishing the importance of the Higgs boson.
In 2012, he was awarded the Vannevar Bush Award for his extraordinary contributions to understanding the basic forces and particles of nature.[4]

 After receiving his Ph.D and then becoming a faculty member at Columbia University he was promoted to full professor in 1958 as Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics.[9]:796 In 1960, on leave from Columbia, he spent some time at CERN in Geneva as a Ford Foundation Fellow.[11] He took an extended leave of absence from Columbia in 1979 to become director of Fermilab.[12] Resigning from Columbia (and retiring from Fermilab) in 1989 to teach briefly at the University of Chicago.[13] He then moved to the physics department of the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he served as the Pritzker Professor of Science.[13] In 1991, Lederman became President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.[14]

Lederman was also one of the main proponents of the "Physics First" movement.[15] 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.[15]
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.[14][16] Lederman served as President of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and at the time of his death was Chair Emeritus.[17] He also served on the board of trustees for Science Service, now known as Society for Science & the Public, from 1989 to 1992, and was a member of the JASON defense advisory group.[18]

In 1956, parity is violated in weak interactions. R. L. Garwin, Leon Lederman, and R. Weinrich modified an existing cyclotron experiment, and they immediately verified the parity violation.[19] They delayed publication of their results until after Wu's group was ready, and the two papers appeared back to back in the same physics journal.

Among his achievements are the discovery of the muon neutrino in 1962 and the bottom quark in 1977.[16] These helped establish his reputation as among the top particle physicists.[16]

In 1977, a group of physicists, the E288 experiment team, led by Lederman announced that a particle with a mass of about 6.0 GeV was being produced by the Fermilab particle accelerator.[16] 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 and Lederman's first name.[20]

As the director of Fermilab and subsequent Nobel Prize in Physics winner, Lederman was a prominent supporter[21][22] of the Superconducting Super Collider project, which was endorsed around 1983, and was a major proponent and advocate throughout its lifetime.[23][24] 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.[25] The increasingly moribund project was finally shelved that same year after some $2 billion of expenditures.[21]

In The God Particle he 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" while stressing the importance of the Higgs boson.[9]:87[26]
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).[16]

In 1995, he received the Chicago History Museum "Making History Award" for Distinction in Science Medicine and Technology.[27]
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.[28] In October 2010, Lederman participated in the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Lunch with a Laureate program where middle and high school students engaged in an informal conversation with a Nobel Prize-winning scientist over a brown-bag lunch.[29] Lederman was also a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Advisory Board.[30]


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