Leon Lederman

Leon Lederman is the world's foremost experimental physicist, one of the very small group of thinkers who revolutionized our understanding of the subatomic world. In the late 1950s and early '60s, he participated in the discovery of the K-meson particle and the non-conservation of parity during muon decay. In 1962, with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, he designed and performed an experiment that proved the existence of the muon neutrino. The 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Lederman and his partners for "transforming the ghostly neutrino into an active tool of research." As Director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois Lederman led the efforts which found the first anti-matter particle in 1965 and the bottom quark in 1977. He laid the groundwork for discovery of the mysterious top quark, detected by researchers at Fermi Lab in 1994. In addition to his scientific works, Leon Lederman has written highly accessible works for the general reader, such as The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? in which he described the elusive particle, now known as "Higg's boson," which physicists believe endows objects with mass. He discusses this, and many other questions in his 2011 book, Quantum Physics for Poets. This podcast was recorded during his address to the Academy of Achievement at the Academy's 1982 Summit in New Orleans, Louisiana.