Leaping atop a 4-foot-high table at the front of his lecture hall, Leon Lederman raises his hands high above his head to drop a quarter and a sheet of paper.
The 70-year-old Nobel Prize-winning physicist has just worked a formula on the board predicting that it takes about one second for an object to fall 16 feet, and now he’s putting his mathematics into action.
The quarter hits the floor well under a second, but the sheet of paper takes at least two seconds before fluttering to rest.
“What’s going on here?” an animated Lederman shouts to his morning class of sleepy-eyed freshmen.
“Air?” ask a few, tentatively.
“Right!” Lederman responds with enthusiasm. “Air complicates things. Now, we’ll give the paper some help and try it again.”
Lederman crumples the sheet of paper into a ball, drops it with the quarter, and both hit the floor in less than a second. He jumps down from his perch and continues to tell budding engineers at the Illinois Institute of Technology about velocity, gravity and acceleration.
Velocity can be measured in miles per hour, which puts Lederman in mind of a story from the late physicist Richard Feynman about the driver stopped by a cop who clocked him going 60 m.p.h.
“Don’t be ridiculous, officer,” says the driver, “I only left my garage 10 minutes ago!”
The students barely respond. Four dozen 18- and 19-year-olds at 9 a.m. are a tough house indeed for a standup comic, especially when he has to keep talking about physics between jokes.
But after 40 years of practice, Lederman can take his physics and his jokes just about anywhere without missing a beat or losing enthusiasm.
Which is why, at a time in life when many scientists retreat from active careers to pursue special professional interests and private recreations, Leon Max Lederman, director emeritus of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Batavia, is still traveling 60 miles per hour in his quest to acquaint the uninitiated with the joys of science.
Besides teaching IIT freshman physics, Lederman has been meeting with moguls in movies and TV trying to persuade them to put more science into mass media. He is directing an effort to upgrade math and science skills of Chicago public school teachers, and he has written a book explaining physics to the average person.
In all these endeavors, Lederman is motivated by distress at the rampant science illiteracy in a society in which high technology dominates more and more.
“Of course,” says the physicist whose demeanor suggests the Marx Brothers, “I also hope the book makes me a fortune.”
The book, “The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?” (Houghton Mifflin), is classic Lederman-a collection of jokes and wisecracks punctuated by physics.
After being persuaded by science writer Dick Teresi to do a book, Lederman was amazed at the interest among publishers, who, not so amazingly, remember that “A Brief History of Time,” by British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, was a best seller.
Most physics books, Lederman notes, are written by theoreticians, probably because theorists have time on their hands that experimentalists lack.
Of course, thinking about theories all the time takes its toll, as Lederman, the consummate experimentalist, is quick to note.
A common hazard is insomnia.
“One theorist, it is said, went to the lab physician with great concern: `Doctor, you have to help me! I sleep well at night, and the mornings aren’t bad, but all afternoon, I toss and turn,’ ” Lederman tells readers.
Another hazard to theorists is arrogance.
“During my reign at Fermilab, I solemnly cautioned our theory group against arrogance,” Lederman writes. “At least one of them took me seriously. I’ll never forget the prayer I overheard emanating from his office: `Dear Lord, forgive me the sin of arrogance, and Lord, by arrogance, I mean the following . . .’ “
Lederman wrote his book longhand while flying in airplanes and sent his work to Teresi for polishing and revision. Now that it’s finished, he wonders how he’ll pass his travel time.
Lederman’s “God Particle” refers to the entity physicists call the Higgs boson. It was proposed by Peter Higgs, a Scottish physicist, to explain the nature of mass and why some particles weigh nothing while some otherwise similar particles are massive.
The question of how particles acquire mass, and the search for physical proof of Higgs’ theoretical mass field, is behind construction of the $8 billion superconducting supercollider physics machine in Texas.
The seeming otherworldly nature of particle physics is a challenge for anyone’s powers of explanation, so Lederman’s unfailing good humor and knack for storytelling are especially welcome in this task.
The invisible soccer ball
To describe how it is that scientists can learn about subatomic particles like quarks that have never been directly observed, Lederman uses the concept of an invisible soccer ball.
Suppose an intelligent race from the planet Twilo is just like humans except that they cannot see objects that juxtapose black and white. So zebras, football referee shirts and soccer balls, among other things, are invisible to them.
Imagine a delegation of these aliens attending a soccer game where they observe the players running about and hear the cheering crowd, but cannot see the ball.
“The Twiloans spend about 15 minutes being totally mystified. Then, to pass the time, they attempt to understand the game. Some use classification techniques,” Lederman writes.
“They deduce, partially because of the clothing, that there are two teams in conflict with one another. They chart the movements of the various players, discovering that each player appears to remain more or less within a certain geographical territory on the field. They discover that different players display different physical motions.
“The Twiloans, as humans would do, clarify their search for meaning in World Cup soccer by giving names to the different positions played by each footballer. The positions are categorized, compared and contrasted. The qualities and limitations of each position are listed on a giant chart.
“A major break comes when the Twiloans discover that symmetry is at work. For each position on Team A, there is a counterpart on Team B.
“With two minutes remaining in the game, the Twiloans have composed dozens of charts, hundreds of tables and formulas, and scores of complicated rules about soccer matches. And though the rules might all be, in a limited way, correct, none would really capture the essence of the game. Then one young pipsqueak of a Twiloan, silent until now, speaks his mind. `Let’s postulate,’ he ventures nervously, `the existence of an invisible ball.’ “
While most of his colleagues were noting the obvious, Lederman’s Twiloan pipsqueak was watching for unusual events on the soccer field. He saw a momentary bulge at the back of the goal net just before the crowd cheered and the referee announced a score.
This clue set the lad to watching the nets closely as he weighed the significance of the occasional momentary bulges he saw and the actions that immediately followed each event.
The Twiloans found that by assuming there was a ball they couldn’t see, the many rules they had discovered not only were still valid, but now made sense.
“This is an extended metaphor for many puzzles in physics,” Lederman writes, “and it is especially relevant to particle physics. We can’t understand the rules (the laws of nature) without knowing the objects (the ball) and, without a belief in a logical set of laws, we would never deduce the existence of all the particles.”
War surplus science
Because Lederman is an experimenter by experience and temperament, his approach to nature’s laws is more concrete than that of the theorists who usually write physics books. He tells about the tons of steel, the strands of wire and rows of crystals that make a modern physics experiment.
In the early days of Lederman’s career, many materials that went into physics experiments were war surplus. A lot of scrap steel from retired battleships was used to absorb particles. Even a big gun found a role as collimator, a device to focus and aim particle beams.
“We wanted to fill it up with beryllium as a filter, but the bore had these deep rifling grooves,” Lederman writes. “So I sent a skinny graduate student inside to stuff steel wool into the grooves. He spent about an hour in there and crawled out all hot, sweaty and irritated and said, `I quit!’
” `You can’t quit,’ I cried. `Where will I find another student of your caliber?’ “
One might conclude that humor and charm won Lederman his successes, but that would overlook his large role in advancing physics during the last four decades.
James Cronin, a Nobelist in physics at the University of Chicago who has known Lederman since the 1950s when both worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, said Lederman’s accomplishments in physics transcend the one experiment for which he shared the Nobel Prize in 1988. That experiment led to a new tool for studying the weak nuclear force, which affects the radioactive decay of atoms.
Cronin calculates that at least four Lederman experimental discoveries are Nobel Prize quality.
“He recognized before anyone else the things truly important in physics,” Cronin said. “He is a truly great scientist.”
Michael Riordan, a physicist and author at SLAC, the physics accelerator at Stanford University, said Lederman is extremely well-liked in the physics community and is regarded as a top-notch physicist who doesn’t take himself too seriously.
“He’s fun to be around and he pokes fun at himself,” Riordan said. “Only a few of these guys do that.”
The call to teach
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Lederman is just how down-to-earth and approachable he is. His very existence should shatter the common notion that scientists are somehow superhumans who are fundamentally different from the rest of us.
As a boy, Lederman was no genius tinkering with tin cans to turn them into hi-fi players. His brother, Paul, who never went to college, was the family tinkerer. Growing up in the Bronx, young Leon never dreamed of being a scientist, though he did think about becoming a farmer.
While in college, Lederman found classes difficult. He worked hard, sometimes struggling, to be a B student. He majored in chemistry as an undergraduate but switched to physics because he liked the fellows studying physics better.
“My inner drive was that these guys were really great,” Lederman said. “If I could just hang around with these guys without being too conspicuous, that would be great.
“It was five years after getting my Ph.D. that I realized that I had a different way of looking at things, that this was my talent in science.”
Even after a rich career as a scientist and administrator of Fermilab, one of physics’ most prestigious labs, Lederman still feels a calling as a teacher. While still directing Fermilab, he worked to found the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy to provide a superior education to gifted high school students. Upon leaving his directorship, Lederman taught undergraduates at the University of Chicago, and he continues to do so at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
He wants to guide young people who may go on to be scientists and engineers, certainly, but he really wants to teach everyone.
“I’m really interested in K through 8th grade,” he said. “How do kids think? Kids are curious, natural scientists. How can we nurture that instead of stifle it? I have two grandchildren I’d like to understand better.
“I wish we knew how to train people to be comfortable with science. Not to be afraid of it. I don’t mean make them all scientists, but just to be comfortable with it.”
