A laundryman’s son in New York
Leon Max Lederman was born in New York City on July 15, 1922, the younger son of Morris and Minna (Rosenberg) Lederman, Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire whose families came from Kyiv and Odesa. His father ran a hand laundry and, as Lederman later wrote, venerated learning. His brother Paul, six years older, was a gifted tinkerer who could fix almost anything, and the younger boy grew up watching him take things apart.
In his Nobel autobiography Lederman described the New York of his youth as a city that gave future scientists everything they needed: streets, schools, entertainment, culture and a mix of peoples. He started at Public School 92 on Broadway in 1927, went on to neighbourhood junior and senior high schools, graduated from James Monroe High School in the Bronx and then entered the free City College of New York, the ladder by which so many children of Jewish immigrants climbed into the professions.
From chemistry to physics
At City College Lederman majored in chemistry, but he fell in with a group of friends who were heading into physics, among them his high school friend Martin J. Klein, later a noted historian of science. Lederman liked to say that Klein convinced him of the splendours of physics during a long evening over many beers. He graduated in 1943 and spent the next three years in the United States Army, rising to second lieutenant in the Signal Corps.
In September 1946 he entered the graduate physics programme at Columbia University, then chaired by the Nobel laureate I. I. Rabi. Columbia was building a synchrocyclotron, a particle accelerator, at its Nevis Laboratories in Irvington-on-Hudson, and Lederman joined the project in 1948. His thesis assignment was to build a cloud chamber, a device that makes the tracks of charged particles visible. He received his PhD in 1951 and stayed at Columbia for the next 28 years, becoming a full professor in 1958 and director of the Nevis Laboratories from 1961.
Hunting the smallest things
Lederman became one of the most productive experimental physicists of his generation. In 1956, working at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, he and colleagues discovered the long-lived neutral K meson. The same year, with Richard Garwin and Marcel Weinrich, he quickly adapted a cyclotron experiment to confirm that the weak nuclear force does not treat left and right the same way, a startling result known as parity violation; their paper appeared alongside that of Chien-Shiung Wu’s team.
His most celebrated experiment came in 1962. Neutrinos are ghostly particles that pass through almost everything, and physicists had wondered whether the neutrino produced alongside a muon was the same as the one produced with an electron. Lederman, Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger built the first beam of neutrinos made with a particle accelerator, at Brookhaven, and fired it into a massive detector made of aluminium spark chambers. The rare collisions produced muons but not electrons, proving that there were at least two different kinds of neutrino. The discovery showed that nature’s building blocks come in families, a cornerstone of what became the Standard Model of particle physics, and the neutrino beam method they invented became a standard tool. In 1988 the three shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for it.
In 1977 a team led by Lederman at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago found a new heavy particle, the upsilon, which revealed the existence of a fifth quark, the bottom quark. A year earlier the same group had briefly announced a different particle that turned out to be a statistical fluke; colleagues cheerfully nicknamed it the Oops-Leon, and Lederman enjoyed the joke as much as anyone.
Directing Fermilab
In the early 1960s Lederman had been among the physicists who proposed a new national accelerator laboratory, the one that became Fermilab. In 1978 he took leave from Columbia to become its director, a post he held until 1989. He united the laboratory’s staff and rallied American particle physicists behind the construction of the Tevatron, the first superconducting synchrotron. It became the world’s highest-energy particle collider and held that title from 1983 until 2010; experiments there later discovered the top quark.
He also tried to make the laboratory a cultural centre as well as a scientific one. Colleagues remembered the farmhouse on the Fermilab site where he and his second wife, Ellen, kept horses and chickens and entertained artists, musicians, writers and politicians alongside physicists. He strongly supported the planned Superconducting Super Collider in Texas, and in 1993 he published The God Particle, written with Dick Teresi, to explain to the public why the search for the Higgs boson mattered. The collider was cancelled that year, but the book’s title gave the Higgs its popular nickname.
Teaching a state to love science
For the wider world, Lederman’s most lasting gift may be what he did for schools. At Columbia, which required its researchers to teach, he had found a passion for education; he supervised some 50 doctoral students and joked in his Nobel biography that none, to his knowledge, was in jail. As director of Fermilab he established Saturday Morning Physics, an ongoing programme in which laboratory physicists teach particle physics to high school students from the Chicago area. It has run ever since, and for decades Chicago-area teenagers have used it to learn from working scientists.
In 1983 he met Stephanie Marshall, a local school administrator who shared his ideas. Both had grown up in the Bronx, and Lederman told her that Illinois needed its own version of the Bronx High School of Science. Working with Marshall, the governor and the state legislature, he helped create the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora, established in 1985 and opened in 1986: a free, public, residential high school for talented students from across the state. Marshall became its founding president, Lederman sat on its board, and after leaving Fermilab he kept an office there as resident scholar, chatting with students as he walked the halls with an ice cream cone.
After he retired from Fermilab in 1989 he became science adviser to the Governor of Illinois and helped organise the Teachers Academy for Mathematics and Science, which aimed to retrain 20,000 Chicago public school teachers in how to teach those subjects. He campaigned for Physics First, the idea that high schools should teach physics before chemistry and biology because the other sciences rest on it. Fermilab’s education centre for schoolchildren and teachers, the Lederman Science Center, is named in his honour. He served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and, unusually for a Nobel laureate, taught physics to non-science students at the University of Chicago.
A Jewish New Yorker
Lederman’s story is a classic one of the children of Jewish immigrants in twentieth-century New York: a small family business, parents who prized education above almost everything, public schools and a free city college that opened the door to a scientific career. He was proud of that background and returned to it often, celebrating New York’s ethnic mix as the soil that produced so many scientists. In 2007 he and Stephanie Marshall gave a joint commencement speech at the Illinois academy titled Two Kids from the Bronx.
He was not religious. He described himself as an atheist and received an award from the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry for his defence of reason. Jewish organisations nonetheless claimed him with pride, and he appears on the standard lists of Jewish Nobel laureates in physics.
Humour and character
Almost everyone who worked with Lederman mentioned his jokes. Former students recalled him dropping into the counting room at Brookhaven during long overnight shifts with cigars, stories and encouragement, and taking a sick graduate student out for hot-and-sour soup. He was, said one colleague, equally comfortable talking to third graders and to United States senators, and he could write for a physics journal or for a newspaper with the same ease.
He had three children, Rena, Jesse and Rachel, with his first wife, Florence Gordon. With his second wife, Ellen Carr, he lived for many years at Fermilab and later in Driggs, Idaho. He served on many unpaid boards of museums, schools and science organisations, chaired the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and worked to build scientific collaboration with Latin America.
Last years
Lederman began to lose his memory around 2011. Faced with heavy medical bills, in 2015 he sold his Nobel Prize medal at auction for $765,000. He died of complications of dementia on October 3, 2018, at a care home in Rexburg, Idaho, aged 96.
Among his many other honours were the National Medal of Science in 1965, the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982, the Enrico Fermi Award in 1992 and the Vannevar Bush Award in 2012. An asteroid, 85185 Lederman, is named after him.
Legacy
Lederman’s experiments helped show what matter is made of: two kinds of neutrino, a fifth quark, and an orderly family structure among the fundamental particles that sits at the heart of modern physics. The neutrino beam technique he co-invented is still used in experiments around the world, and the Tevatron he championed produced decades of discoveries.
Yet the people who benefit most from his life are probably not physicists at all. The Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy still educates talented students from across the state free of charge, and Saturday Morning Physics and the Lederman Science Center continue to introduce children and teachers to science. Lederman believed that understanding the universe should not be the property of a few specialists, and he spent the second half of his career making sure ordinary schoolchildren had a share in it.
Sources & further reading
Leon M. Lederman, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Leon M. Lederman, Fermilab Office of Education and Public Outreach · Leon Lederman (1922–2018), Physics Today · Leon M. Lederman, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.