Leon Lederman, father of "the particle of God", dies | Science

Leon Lederman, Nobel Prize winning physicist and passionate advocate of science education, who coined the term "particle of God," died today at the age of 96. His death was announced by the Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) was director from 1978 to 1989.

Lederman and two of their colleagues shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988 for their discovery, 22 years earlier, that the elusive particles called neutrinos are becoming more of a type. (Physicists now know that there are three types of neutrinos.) Later, Lederman led the team that discovered a particle called the bottom quark. And he led Fermilab during the construction of his Tevatron Collider, the world's most powerful energy atomizer from 1983 to 2010.

But Lederman can be better identified with the neologism in the title of his 1993 book, The particle of God: if the universe is the answer, what is the question? He was referring to the Higgs boson, the last missing piece of the standard particle model and the fundamental forces of physicists, which was finally discovered in 2012.

Some physicists have scorned the term to confuse religion and science. In the book, Lederman naïvely stated that he had chosen it for two reasons. First, he said, his publisher would not let him use a similar, but saltier term. Secondly, writes Lederman, "there is a link, in a way, with another book, a a lot older … "He followed with a passage from Genesis.