Leon M Lederman

Leon Lederman, an experimental physicist who won a Nobel Prize in physics for his work on subatomic particles and coined the phrase “God particle,” died Wednesday at 96. Lederman died at a nursing home in the Idaho town of Rexburg, said Ellen Carr Lederman, his wife of 37 years. Lederman directed the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago from 1978 to 1989. Lederman won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1988 with two other scientists for discovering a subatomic particle called the muon neutrino. He used the prize money to buy a log cabin near the tiny town of Driggs in eastern Idaho as a vacation retreat. The couple moved there full-time in 2011 when Leon Lederman started experiencing memory loss problems that became more severe, his wife said. His Nobel Prize sold for $765,000 in an auction in 2015 to help pay for medical bills and care. Lederman was born July 15, 1922, in New York City to Russian Jewish immigrants. His father operated a hand laundry. Lederman earned a degree in chemistry from City College of New York in 1943, served three years in the US Army during World War II, and then went to Columbia University where he received a Ph.D. in particle physics in 1951.