- Person
- Leon Lederman
- Lived
- 1922–2018
- Field
- Particle physics
- From
- American
The story
Leon Lederman, the son of Jewish immigrants who ran a hand laundry in New York, discovered a passion for teaching during his years at Columbia University, which required its researchers to teach. He supervised some 50 doctoral students there and liked to joke that, to his knowledge, none of them was in jail. When he became director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, in 1978, he looked for ways to open the laboratory to the community around it.
As director he established Saturday Morning Physics, which Fermilab still runs twice a year. Each session, talented high school students from the Chicago area come to the laboratory on Saturday mornings to hear Fermilab scientists explain particle physics, the science of the smallest building blocks of matter, and to see the facilities where that science is done. For decades, Chicago-area students have used it to learn particle physics with expert guidance from leading scientists. Fermilab's education centre for schoolchildren and teachers, the Lederman Science Center, is named in his honour.
Lederman also worked on the teachers themselves. After retiring from Fermilab in 1989 he became science adviser to the Governor of Illinois and helped organise the Teachers Academy for Mathematics and Science, designed to retrain 20,000 teachers in the Chicago public schools in how to teach science and mathematics. He campaigned for Physics First, arguing that high schools should teach physics before chemistry and biology because the other sciences build on it, and, unusually for a Nobel laureate, he taught physics to non-science students at the University of Chicago.
Fermilab describes his efforts to improve science education as perhaps his most critical achievement, alongside his discoveries. A former Fermilab colleague recalled that he was equally comfortable speaking with third graders as with United States senators. For Lederman, sharing science with children and teachers was part of the job.
Why it matters
Saturday Morning Physics and the Lederman Science Center still bring Chicago-area students and teachers into contact with working scientists at a national laboratory.
About Leon Lederman
Bronx-raised physicist who co-discovered the muon neutrino and the bottom quark, ran Fermilab, and founded a public science academy and programmes that changed how children learn science.
More about Leon Lederman
Sources
- Leon M. Lederman Fermilab Office of Education and Public Outreach
- Leon M. Lederman, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Leon Lederman (1922-2018) Physics Today
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.