A physicist who invented the "divine particle" and sold his Nobel price to pay medical bills died at age 96

Leon Lederman, former head of Fermilab's National Accelerator Laboratory and Nobel Prize winner in 1988, died in a retirement home in Idaho on October 3. He was 96 years old.

Lederman may be best remembered for having coined the phrase "the particle of God", which refers to the Higgs boson, theorized for decades before finally being observed in 2012.

Unfortunately, Lederman had to sell his Nobel Prize in 2015 to pay for medical care for dementia, a terrifying accusation against the US health care system. The United States is the only rich and advanced country in the world not to guarantee health care for all its citizens. The Nobel Prize is sold for $ 765,000 to an anonymous online buyer.

"It's terrible," Leon's wife Ellen Lederman told NBC News in 2015 after the Nobel Prize was sold. "It's really hard, I wish it could be different, but he's happy, he likes where he lives with cats, dogs and horses, he has no anxiety problems, which makes me makes you happy with your satisfaction. "

From the Associated Press:

Lederman was born on July 15, 1922 in New York, where his father operated a washbasin. Lederman obtained a degree in chemistry from the City College of New York in 1943, served for three years in the US Army during World War II, and at Columbia University where he earned a PhD. in particle physics in 1951.

He began making discoveries involving subatomic particles, before becoming director of the Fermilab National Laboratory of Accelerators.

Some scientists dispute the name "particle of God" as sensationalism, but it is officially part of the international lexicon to this day. It is not changed. Lederman had the gift of helping the public better understand the science and complexity of the Higgs boson was not different.