Personal Life
Dr. Lederman was born in New York to a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia. His father operated a hand laundry while encouraging Leon to pursue his education. He went to elementary school in New York City, continuing on to college and his doctorate in the city.
In his book,The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?, Lederman writes that, although he was a chemistry major, he became fascinated with physics, because of the clarity of the logic and the unambiguous results from experimentation. His best friend during his college years, Martin Klein, convinced him of "the splendors of physics during a long evening over many beers." After that conversation he became resolute and unwavering regarding his desire to pursue physics. When he joined the Army with a B.S. in Chemistry, he was determined to become a physicist following his service.
After three years in the U.S. Army during World War II, he took up physics at Columbia University, and received his Masters in 1948. Lederman began his Ph.D research working with Columbia's Nevis synchro-cyclotron, which was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world at that time. Dwight D. Eisenhower, then the president of Columbia University, and future president of the United States, cut the ribbon dedicating the synchro-cyclotron in June 1950. These atom smashers were just coming of age at this time and created the new discipline of particle physics.
After receiving his Ph.D and then becoming a faculty member at Columbia University he was promoted to full professor in 1958.
In "The God Particle" he once wrote "The history of atomism is one of reductionism – the effort to reduce all the operations of nature to a small number of laws governing a small number of primordial objects." And this was the quest he undertook. This book shows that he pursued the quark, and hopes to find the Higgs boson. The top quark, which he and other physicists realized must exist according to the standard model, was, in fact, produced at Fermilab not long after this book was published.
He is known for his sense of humor in the physics community. On August 26, 2008 Dr. Lederman was video-recorded by a science focused organization called ScienCentral, on the street in a major U.S. city, answering questions from passersby. He answered questions such as "What is the strong force?" and "What happened before the Big Bang?".
He has three children with his first wife, Florence Gordon, and now lives with his second wife, Ellen, in Batavia, Illinois.
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