利昂·莱德曼

利昂·马克斯·莱德曼（英语：Leon Max Lederman，1922年7月15日—2018年10月3日）是一名美国物理学家、1988年诺贝尔物理学奖获得者、费米国家加速器实验室前主任；他也是一位富有远见的科学教育倡导者，曾任美国科学促进会理事会主席、国际艺术与科技奥林匹克学术顾问。

生平

利昂·莱德曼生于纽约；1946年进入哥伦比亚大学物理系读研究生；1951年获得博士学位后留校工作；1958年后任该校教授；1979-1989年曾任费米国家加速器实验室主任，并主持设计了超导超级对撞机建造计划。

他在粒子物理实验领域成果卓著，并因“中微子束方法及通过发现μ中微子验证轻子的二重态结构”而荣获1988年诺贝尔物理学奖。此外，他还做出了多项奠基性贡献，包括发现中性K介子、反氘核与底夸克，推动美国高能物理跻身全球研究前沿。

2018年10月3日，莱德曼在爱达荷州雷克斯堡安详离世，享年96岁。

教育事业

莱德曼长期从事教育工作，曾任美国科学促进会理事会主席、国际艺术与科技奥林匹克首任学术顾问。他终将科学教育视作自己最重要的使命，参与创办伊利诺伊数理学院——美国第一所寄宿制STEM高中；同时面向大众笔耕不辍，代表作《上帝粒子》让一代代青年读者得以窥见物理学的前沿疆域。

Leon Max Lederman (July 15, 1922 – October 3, 2018) was an American experimental physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988, along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, for research on neutrinos. He also received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982, along with Martin Lewis Perl, for research on quarks and leptons. Lederman was director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, in Aurora, Illinois in 1986, where he was resident scholar emeritus from 2012 until his death in 2018.

An accomplished scientific writer, he became known for his 1993 book The God Particle establishing the popularity of the term for the Higgs boson.

Early life and education

Lederman was born in New York City, New York, to Morris and Minna (Rosenberg) Lederman. His parents were Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants from Kyiv and Odesa. Lederman graduated from James Monroe High School in the South Bronx, and received his bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1943.

Lederman enlisted in the United States Army Signal Corps during World War II, intending to become a physicist after his service. Following his discharge in 1946, he enrolled at Columbia University's graduate school, receiving his Ph.D. in 1951.

Academic career

Lederman became a faculty member at Columbia University, and he was promoted to full professor in 1958 as Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics. In 1960, on leave from Columbia, he spent time at CERN in Geneva as a Ford Foundation Fellow. He took an extended leave of absence from Columbia in 1979 to become director of Fermilab. Resigning from Columbia (and retiring from Fermilab) in 1989, he then taught briefly at the University of Chicago. He then moved to the physics department of the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he served as the Pritzker Professor of Science. In 1992, Lederman served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Lederman, rare for a Nobel Prize winning professor, took it upon himself to teach physics to non-physics majors at The University of Chicago.

Lederman served as president of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and at the time of his death was chair emeritus. He also served on the board of trustees for Science Service, now known as Society for Science & the Public, from 1989 to 1992, and was a member of the JASON defense advisory group. Lederman was also one of the main proponents of the "Physics First" movement. Also known as "Right-side Up Science" and "Biology Last," this movement seeks to rearrange the current high school science curriculum so that physics precedes chemistry and biology.

In the early 2000s, Lederman became the inaugural academic advisor of the International ArtScience Olympiad. He was an early supporter of Science Debate 2008, an initiative to get the then-candidates for president, Barack Obama and John McCain, to debate the nation's top science policy challenges. In October 2010, Lederman participated in the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Lunch with a Laureate program where middle and high school students engaged in an informal conversation with a Nobel Prize-winning scientist over a brown-bag lunch. Lederman was also a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's advisory board.

Academic work

In 1956, Lederman worked on parity violation in weak interactions. R. L. Garwin, Leon Lederman, and R. Weinrich modified an existing cyclotron experiment, and they immediately verified the parity violation. They delayed publication of their results until after Wu's group was ready, and the two papers appeared back-to-back in the same physics journal. Among his achievements are the discovery of the muon neutrino in 1962 and the bottom quark in 1977. These helped establish his reputation as among the top particle physicists.