Leon Lederman, Nobel Prize honoree who coined 'God Particle,' dies at 96

[sandensea]

Leon Lederman, the U.S. physicist who won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering one of the universe’s subatomic building blocks before coining the term “God particle” to describe the mechanism that gives mass to matter, has died. He was 96.

He died Wednesday in Rexburg, Idaho, according to the website of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, where he had once served as director.

Lederman shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in physics with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger for detecting the muon neutrino, a previously unknown member of the lepton family of particles. At Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, they used a high-energy accelerator to produce a beam of neutrinos, which can create muons and electrons on interaction with matter.

The discovery in 1962 helped build on the so-called Standard Model, which explains how subatomic components interact with invisible fields to gain mass. The model was complete when scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research announced in 2012 that they had detected the Higgs boson, named after U.K. physicist Peter Higgs.

“How can we have our colleagues in chemistry, medicine, and especially literature share with us, not the cleverness of our research, but the beauty of the intellectual edifice, of which our experiment is but one brick?” Lederman said in his Nobel banquet speech.

At: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-03/leon-lederman-nobelist-who-coined-god-particle-dies-at-96

Prof. Leon Lederman and friend

[murielm99]

1. He also founded Illinois Math and Science Academy,

where two of my children went to school.

My son works at Fermi Lab. Leon was revered there.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Such an accomplished life. The world needs him to come right back A.S.A.P. n/t

[sandensea]

3. Prof. Lederman would no doubt have choice words for Cruella de Vos.

He was a firm believer in making the exact sciences approachable and available to people at large - particularly young people, for whom he established Illinois' first math-and-science high school.

I'm sure he had his regrets, like any of us. But his soul can certainly look down, and be proud of what he left behind - unlike Betsy de Vos and her Blackwater brother (not to mention Cheeto and his pal Macri!).

[Judi Lynn]

4. Yippee! The knee-switching part of the dance looks dangerous! You could fall down!

Great song. I will be remembering it, I can tell already! Cool.

Wish someone could get her to hear it.

She's another impossibly underhanded, dirty Republian crime against humanity, she and her murderous, greedy brother.