Jewish physicist wins Nobel Prize – The Forward

Leon Lederman, a physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on subatomic particles, died Wednesday, reported the Associated Press. He was 96 years old.

Lederman, who led the Fermilab National Laboratory of Accelerators from 1978 to 1989, coined the term "divine particle" and wrote a book of the same name.

It refers to a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, which was simply a theory before it was discovered by a European particle collider in 2012.

Lederman won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988 with two other scientists for the discovery of a subatomic particle called the muon neutrino.

With the prize money, he bought a log cabin in a small town in eastern Idaho for him and his wife Ellen, aged 37, to spend a vacation. They moved there full time in 2011, when Lederman's memory began to weaken. His Nobel Prize was sold at an auction of $ 765,000 to cover medical expenses.

Ellen Carr Lederman told AP that her passion for sharing science was profound.

"What he really loved was people, who are trying to educate them and help them understand what they do in science," she said.

Michael Turner, a professor at the University of Chicago, said in a statement that Lederman had "made an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of the fundamental forces and particles of nature".

"But he was also a leader far ahead of his time in science education, as an ambassador for science around the world and transferring the benefits of basic research to the national good," said Turner.

Alyssa Fisher is a news editor at the Forward. Send him an e-mail at the address [email protected] or follow him on Twitter at the address @alyssalfisher