Leon Lederman Biography -- Academy of Achievement

Nobel Prize in Physics Leon Lederman Date of birth: July 15, 1922	Print Biography

Leon Max Lederman was born in New York City, the second son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. He studied chemistry at City College of New York, receiving his BS in 1943. Following three years in the army during World War II, he studied physics at Columbia University, earning his Master's in 1948 and his Ph.D. in 1951.

Leon Lederman stayed on at Columbia following his studies, remaining for nearly 30 years, as the Eugene Higgins Professor and, from 1961 until 1979, as director of Nevis Laboratories in Irvington, the Columbia physics department center for experimental research in high-energy physics. With colleagues and students from Nevis he led an intensive and wide-ranging series of experiments which have provided major advances in the understanding of "weak interactions," one of the fundamental nuclear forces.

In 1956, working with a Columbia team at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, Lederman discovered a new particle, the long-lived neutral K-meson, which had been predicted from theory. Further research at Columbia demonstrated the non-conservation of parity during muon decay.

In the early 1960s, Lederman and his colleagues were preoccupied with neutrinos, ghostlike particles that pass through everything in the universe. At the time, only the electron-neutrino was known, and the scientists wondered if they could find more types of neutrinos. Columbia's AGS, then the most powerful accelerator in the world, was capable of producing the beam needed to perform the necessary experiments. In 1962, Dr. Lederman, with his colleagues Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, succeeded in identifying the second such particle, the muon neutrino.

The experiment used a beam of the AGS's energetic protons to produce a shower of pi mesons, which traveled 70 feet toward a 5,000-ton steel wall made of old battleship plates. On the way, they decayed into muons and neutrinos, but only the latter particles could pass through the wall into a neon-filled detector called a spark chamber. There, the impact of neutrinos on aluminum plates produced muon spark trails that could be detected and photographed -- proving the existence of muon neutrinos.

The experiment's use of the first-ever neutrino beam paved the way for scientists to use these particles in research at the AGS and around the world, and eventually netted Lederman and his partners a Nobel Prize in Physics. Since the team's work, neutrinos have been used as a way of analyzing everything from the structure of the atomic nucleus to the energy level of an exploding star, or supernova.

This early award-winning research in high-energy physics brought Dr. Lederman into national science policy circles and in 1963 he proposed the idea that eventually became the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.

The design of ever more powerful accelerators, first at Brookhaven National Laboratory, enabled Lederman and his team to find the first anti-matter particle in 1965. In 1977 Lederman led the team at Fermilab that discovered the subatomic particle known as the bottom quark. The following year he was named Director of the laboratory. By 1983, his administration had brought Fermilab into a position of international prominence with the construction of the world's most powerful superconducting accelerator, the Tevatron.

A convinced proponent of science education, Lederman opened Fermilab to countries not previously associated with high energy physics. During his term as Director, Lederman also emphasized the importance of math and science education as outreach to the neighboring communities. He initiated the Saturday Morning Physics lectures and subsequently founded the Friends of Fermilab.

The 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Lederman and his old partners, Schwartz and Steinberger for "transforming the ghostly neutrino into an active tool of research." In 1989, Dr. Lederman stepped down as Director of Fermilab and assumed the title director emeritus. He then served as Frank L. Sulzberger Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago, and pursued his increasing interest in the problems of science education in American schools. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, the first state-wide residence public school for gifted children, and the Teacher's Academy of Mathematics and Science in Chicago.

Today, Dr. Lederman is Pritzker Professor of Physics at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has received numerous awards besides the Nobel, including the National Medal of Science (1965), the Elliot Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute (1976), and the Wolf Prize in Physics (1982). He is a past chairman and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1993 he was awarded the Enrico Fermi Prize by President Clinton. He has served as founding member of the High-Energy Physics Advisory Panel and the International Committee for Future Accelerators.

In 1994, researchers at Fermilab achieved an old goal of Dr. Lederman's, detecting the top quark, the bottom quark's elusive companion, which had escaped observation for the previous 17 years.

Leon Lederman's publication list runs to 200 papers. He is co-author of the books, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? (1989, written with Dick Teresi) and From Quarks to the Cosmos: Tools of Discovery (1995, co-author David N. Schramm). In these works, Lederman uses humor, metaphor, and storytelling to delve into the mysteries of matter, discussing particle accelerators and the yet-to-be-discovered "God particle."