Nobel Laureate to Give Public Lecture at Gustavus

Dr. Leon Lederman, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1988 and the Pritzker Professor of Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology, will give a free public lecture at Gustavus Adolphus College on Friday, Oct. 24.

Lederman’s lecture is titled “Why Did the U.S. Collaborate to Build an Eight Billion Dollar Particle Accelerator?” and will occur at 7:30 p.m. in room 103 of F.W. Olin Hall for Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science.

Lederman will explain why 30 nations, including the United States, collaborated and shared substantial fractions of their research budgets to build the world’s most powerful particle accelerator on the border between Switzerland and France.

Lederman received the Nobel Prize in 1988 along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger for work on “the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino.”

After a 28-year stint on the faculty of Columbia University, Lederman became Director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., where he supervised the construction and utilization of the first superconducting synchrotron and at time the highest energy accelerator in the world. In 1986 he helped to found the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, a three year residence public school for gifted children in the state of Illinois.

Besides the Nobel Prize, Lederman’s other honors include the National Medal of Science (1965), the Cresson Medal for Physics (1976), the Wolf Prize for Physics (1982), and the Enrico Fermi Award (1993).

Lederman is also one of the main proponents of the “Physics First” movement, which seeks to rearrange current high school science curriculum so that students would take physics before chemistry and biology. Lederman will address that very topic at Gustavus on Saturday, Oct. 25 when he addresses the Minnesota Area Association of Physics Teachers.

For more information on Lederman’s visit to Gustavus, contact Professor of Physics Chuck Niederriter at chuck@gustavus.edu or 507-933-7315.