Leon Max Lederman

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Leon M. Lederman (2007)

Leon Max Lederman (born July 15, 1922 in New York City , † October 3, 2018 in Rexburg , Idaho ) was an American physicist and Nobel Prize winner in physics .

Life

Leon M. Lederman studied chemistry at the City College of New York ( Bachelor 1943) and at Columbia University , where, after his military service from 1943 to 1946 as an officer in the US Army Signal Corps in 1948 his master's degree made and in 1951 received his doctorate . From 1952 he was assistant professor there and from 1958 professor of physics. From 1972 to 1979 he was Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Columbia University. From 1961 to 1979 he was director of Nevis Laboratories there. In 1979 he was appointed director of Fermilab and headed it until 1989. He was then Frank L. Sulzberger Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago and from 1992 Pritzker Professor of Physics at the Illinois Institute of Technology .

Lederman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988 together with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger “for the neutrino beam method and the proof of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino ”. Within these experimental investigations they were able to show that there are different types of neutrinos. In addition to the well-known electron neutrino , they discovered the muon neutrino in the American Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1962 , thereby confirming a fundamental postulate of the lepton theory.

With the discovery of the bottom quark in 1977 at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia , Illinois , Lederman set another milestone in the physics of elementary particles .

In 1957 he was involved with Richard Garwin and Marcel Weinrich in one of the fundamental experiments to discover parity violation in the weak interaction .

In 1958 Lederman completed his first sabbatical at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), where he put together a team to carry out the g-2 experiment . This CERN program should last about 19 years and involve many CERN physicists ( Picasso , Farley , Charpak , Johannes Sens, Zichichi , etc.). It also initiated some teamwork in CERN research that continued into the mid-1970s.

In 1992 he was President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science . Since 1965 he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences , since 1970 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and since 1989 of the American Philosophical Society . In 2003 he was accepted as an external member of the Russian Academy of Sciences .

With his book The God Particle. If the universe is the answer, what is the question? he coined the term "god particle" for the Higgs boson . Originally he used the expression goddamn particle for it, which means “goddamn particle”, because this could not be proven up to now and the physicists were puzzled. It was only when the book was being edited that the term was shortened to God particle , leading to the misleading assumption that this designation alludes to the fact that a proof of the Higgs boson is equivalent to a proof of the existence of the Higgs field , which is a theoretical explanation for can provide the masses of the elementary particles .

In 2011 he started dementia and moved to Driggs, Idaho with his wife Ellen. In 2015, he auctioned his Nobel Prize medal for $ 765,000 to pay for treatment and care costs. Lederman died on October 3, 2018 in a nursing home in Rexburg, Idaho.

Awards

Fonts

  • With Dick Teresi: The God Particle. If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1993, 2006 (German: The creative particle. The basic building block of the universe. Translated by Friedrich Griese. Bertelsmann, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-570-12037-6 ).
  • With Christopher Hill: Symmetry and the beautiful universe. Prometheus Books, 2004.
  • With David Schramm : From quarks to the cosmos. Tools of discovery. Freeman, 1989 (German: Vom Quark zum Kosmos. Spectrum of Science, Heidelberg 1990, ISBN 978-3-89330-812-5 ).
  • The discovery of the bottom quark, upsilon and b-meson. In: Hoddeson, Brown, Riordan, Dresden (eds.): The rise of the standard model. Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 101-113.

literature

Web links

Commons : Leon M. Lederman  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Leon Lederman, Nobel laureate, former laboratory director and passionate advocate of science education, dies at age 96. In: news.fnal.gov. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, October 3, 2018, accessed October 3, 2018 .
  2. ↑ a b Keith Ridler: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman dies at 96. In: APNews.com. October 4, 2018, accessed October 5, 2018 .
  3. ^ The Nobel Prize in Physics 1988. In: nobelprize.org. Retrieved October 6, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Leon M. Lederman. Biographical. In: nobelprize.org. Retrieved July 25, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Leon Max Lederman. In: Munzinger.de. Retrieved July 25, 2019 .
  6. ^ Member History: Leon M. Lederman. In: search.amphilsoc.org. American Philosophical Society, accessed October 26, 2018 (with biographical information).
  7. ^ Ordem Nacional do Mérito Científico. Leon M. Lederman. ( Memento from May 19, 2003 in the Internet Archive ).
personal data
SURNAME Lederman, Leon Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH July 15, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH 3rd October 2018
Place of death Rexburg , Idaho