Leon M. Lederman

Leon Max Lederman ( born July 15, 1922 in New York City ) is an American physicist.

Life

Leon M. Lederman studied at the City College of New York (Bachelor 1943) and at Columbia University, where he worked until 1946 as an officer in the U.S. Army Signal Corps in 1948 his master's degree made ​​after the military service in 1943 and in 1951 received his doctorate. From 1952 he was assistant professor there from 1958 and Professor of Physics. 1972 to 1979 he was Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Columbia University. 1961 to 1979 he was its director of Nevis Laboratories. In 1979 he was appointed director of Fermilab and ran it until 1989. Afterwards it was 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 in 1988 along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger the Nobel Prize in Physics " for their basic experiments on neutrinos - weakly interacting elementary particles with vanishing or very small rest mass ". Within these experiments, they were able to show that there are different types of neutrinos. In addition to the electron-neutrino already known they discovered in 1962 in the U.S. Brookhaven National Laboratory, the muon neutrino, confirming a fundamental postulate of leptons theory.

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

In 1957 he was involved with Richard Garwin and Marcel Weinrich on one of the basic experiments for the discovery of parity violation in the weak interaction.

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. In 1965 he received the National Medal of Science in 1982 and the Wolf Prize in Physics. In 1992 he received the Enrico Fermi Award.

In his book The God particle - if the universe is the answer, what is the question? he coined the term " Gottesteilchens " for the Higgs boson. He originally used for the expression goddamn particle, so goddamn particle because this previously was not detected and the physicists prepared headaches. Only on the editorial board of the book, the term was shortened to god particle and thus led to the misleading assumption that this designation it allude that a detection of the Higgs boson a proof of the existence of the Higgs field is equivalent to that for a theoretical explanation the rest mass of elementary particles can deliver.

Writings

  • Max Lederman and Dick Teresi ' The God particle - if the universe is the answer, what is the question? Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1993, 2006
  • Max Lederman and Christopher Hill: Symmetry and the beautiful universe. Prometheus Books 2004
  • Max Lederman and David Schramm: From quarks to the cosmos - tools of discovery. Freeman 1989
  • Max Lederman: The discovery of the bottom quark, upsilon and b- meson. In: Hoddeson, Brown, Riordan, Dresden ( ed.): The rise of the standard model. Cambridge University Press 1997, pp. 101-113
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