Lederman, rare for a Nobel Prize winning professor, took it upon himself to teach physics to non-physics majors at The University of Chicago.[18]
Lederman served as president of the board of sponsors of theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and at the time of his death was chair emeritus.[19] He also served on the board of trustees for Science Service, now known asSociety for Science & the Public, from 1989 to 1992, and was a member of theJASON defense advisory group.[20] Lederman was also one of the main proponents of the "Physics First" movement.[21] 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.[21]
Lederman was an early supporter ofScience Debate 2008, an initiative to get the then-candidates for president,Barack Obama andJohn McCain, to debate the nation's top science policy challenges.[22] In October 2010, Lederman participated in theUSA 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.[23] Lederman was also a member of theUSA Science and Engineering Festival's advisory board.[24]
In 1956, Lederman worked onparity violation in weak interactions.R. L. Garwin, Leon Lederman, and R. Weinrich modified an existing cyclotron experiment, and they immediately verified theparity violation.[25] They delayed publication of their results until afterWu's group was ready, and the two papers appeared back-to-back in the same physics journal. Among his achievements are the discovery of themuon neutrino in 1962 and thebottom quark in 1977.[26] These helped establish his reputation as among the top particle physicists.[26]
In 1976, a group of physicists, theE288 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. 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, upsilon, and Lederman's first name. The name was reused for theupsilon meson, which the group discovered from subsequent data in 1977 at a higher mass of 9.5 GeV.[27]
As the director ofFermilab, Lederman was a prominent supporter[28][29] of theSuperconducting Super Collider project, which was endorsed around 1983, and was a major proponent and advocate throughout its lifetime.[30][31] Also at Fermilab, he oversaw the construction of theTevatron, for decades the world's highest-energy particle collider.[32] Lederman later wrote his 1993popular science bookThe 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.[33] The increasingly moribund project was finally shelved that same year after some $2 billion of expenditures.[28] InThe 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 theHiggs boson.[10]: 87 [34]
Lederman's best friend during his college years,Martin J. Klein, convinced him of "the splendors of physics during a long evening over many beers".[36] He was known for his sense of humor in the physics community.[10]: 17 On August 26, 2008, Lederman was video-recorded by a science focused organization called ScienCentral, on the street in New York City, answering questions from passersby.[37] He answered questions such as "What is the strong force?" and "What happened before the Big Bang?".[37]
He had three children with his first wife, Florence Gordon, and toward the end of his life lived with his second wife, Ellen (Carr), inDriggs,Idaho.[7][38]
Lederman was anatheist.[39][40] Lederman began to suffer from memory loss in 2011 and, after struggling withmedical bills, he had to sell his Nobel Prize medal for $765,000 to cover the costs in 2015.[41][42] He died of complications from dementia on October 3, 2018, at a care facility inRexburg, Idaho, at the age of 96.[43][26]
^Charpak, G.; Lederman, L.M.; Sens, J.C.; Zichichi, A. (1960-08-01). "A method for trapping muons in magnetic fields, and its application to a redetermination of the EDM of the muon".Il Nuovo Cimento.17 (3):288–303.Bibcode:1960NCim...17..288C.doi:10.1007/BF02860257.S2CID122283775.
^Lillian Hoddeson; Adrienne Kolb (2011). "Vision to reality: From Robert R. Wilson's frontier to Leon M. Lederman's Fermilab".Physics in Perspective.5 (1):67–86.arXiv:1110.0486.Bibcode:2003PhP.....5...67H.doi:10.1007/s000160300003.S2CID118321614.Lederman also planned what he saw as Fermilab's next machine, the Superconducting SuperCollider (SSC)
^Abbott, Charles (20 June 1987)."Super competition for superconducting super collider".Illinois Issues. p. 18. Retrieved1 Oct 2016.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.
^Kevles, Dan."Good-bye to the SSC"(PDF).California Institute of Technology "Engineering & Science". 58 no. 2 (Winter 1995):16–25. Retrieved16 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 []
^Calder, Nigel (2005).Magic Universe:A Grand Tour of Modern Science. OUP Oxford. pp. 369–370.ISBN9780191622359.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
^Dan Falk (2005). "What About God?".Universe on a T-Shirt: The Quest for the Theory of Everything. Arcade Publishing. p. 195.ISBN9781559707336."Physics isn't a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money." - Leon Lederman
^Gogineni, Babu (July 10, 2012)."It's the Atheist Particle, actually".Rationalist Humans. Postnoon News. Retrieved2 October 2016.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!
^Mottola, Emil (2005). "Review ofSymmetry and the Beautiful Universe Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe by Leon M. Lederman andChristopher T. Hill Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY, 2004. $29.00 (363 pp.). ISBN 1-59102-242-8".Physics Today.58 (11):53–54.doi:10.1063/1.2155761.
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