science · 15 July 1922 · 102 years ago
birth
Born 15 Jul 1922.
Leon Max Lederman is an American physicist who, along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, received the Nobel Prize for Physics in1988 for their joint research and discovery (1960-62) of a new subatomic particle, the muon neutrino. Neutrinos are subatomic particles having no detectable mass and no electric charge, which travel at the speed of light. The discovery of muon neutrinos, a new type of neutrino, was followed by discoveries by other scientists of a number of different “families” of subatomic particle. Together, they now form a standard model, a scheme that has been used to classify all known elementary particles. He was director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. (1979-89).
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