Leon Lederman Interview (page: 5 / 8) Nobel Prize in Physics	Print Interview

You've talked a lot in your writings about the joy of discovery, the sheer thrill. What did it feel like, when you knew you had something?

Leon Lederman: That's a good question. I'm thinking of other discoveries I've been involved in.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Leon Lederman: Almost all of them seem to happen at three o'clock in the morning, mostly on Thursdays. I don't know. There is that occasion when you realize that you're learning something that nobody else knows. It may be you're alone. It may be you're with a graduate student. It may be you're with a colleague. Sometimes it's very gradual. The data accumulates slowly and there's not what we would call "the eureka instant." But sometimes it does happen that way. I can remember several examples of suddenly realizing that the world is very different from the way the four billion people or so that are on the planet know about it.

Can you give us an example?

Leon Lederman: Here's an example. Once upon a time we were studying a particular symmetry. Symmetry is very important. As I said before, simplicity is a key sort of force, forcing our intuition. We have a fundamental belief that the world is very simple, that when we finally understand the universe, we'll be able to fit it on a t-shirt with one symbol and an explanation point: "This is the way the world works." We're not there yet, but one of the ingredients in simplicity is symmetry.

Symmetry means what most artists, and people who appreciate Greek sculpture know about, something which looks the same on the left and the right side. -You see a row of Greek columns, and you see that symmetry of the columns. We were testing one of these deep symmetry principles, which everyone believed was perfect. It's like, if you have a perfect human being who's perfectly symmetrical, and half the person is behind a screen, you see the left side and you can deduce what's behind the screen, even though you don't see it. By looking at the left side, you know what the right side looks like. You can make predictions about nature from your belief in symmetry. We were testing this idea.

Some of the apparatus that we needed was already there on the floor of the accelerator, being polished by a graduate student who was going to use this particular apparatus to do his thesis. This was at Columbia University, at this new atom smasher I told you about, which by that time was well-honed, and well-used. The physics department at Columbia used to go out for Chinese meals, with lots of animated conversation between slurps of winter melon soup and all the good northern Chinese food we liked to eat. On a Friday evening, during a Chinese meal in the city, we got an idea for how to test this idea about symmetry.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Leon Lederman: Suddenly it became clear that there was a way of testing this parity idea. And so, we went to the laboratory and dashed in on this poor, confused steward, and started rearranging the apparatus and telling him do this, do that, do the other thing, and he saw his thesis flying out the window. "What are you doing to my apparatus?" And someone said, "Don't worry about it, it's going to be great." And we worked on the weekend, preparing this experiment. And it turned out that we started collecting data Monday evening, and by three o'clock Tuesday morning we knew something that nobody else in the world knew. That this symmetry idea that we had been working on was not a perfect symmetry, that there was an imperfection in the symmetry, a very important imperfection in the symmetry. That was the key discovery.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Leon Lederman: That's the eureka moment, when suddenly you know something. Your hands sweat, you get into all kinds of symptoms of tremendous excitement. First of all, it's fear. Is it right? And it's incredible humor. "How could it be any other way? It had to be that way! How could we have been so stupid, not to see this?" The next thing is, "When can I tell people?" and, "Who do I want to call first?" Now, all these things jumble in on you in a great feeling of tremendous excitement. Of course, many scientists say, "I do science because I'm curious." That's not enough because if you were satisfying your own curiosity and you couldn't tell anybody how clever you are to find it out, it would be useless. So you've got to communicate. All of this piles in, in this moment of discovery.

It sounds very exciting to me. What about when you won the Nobel prize? Was that a surprise? Where were you? How did you react?

Leon Lederman: Because of the time change, you're generally notified about this at five or six in the morning. They assume they'll be forgiven for waking you. Was it a surprise? Not exactly. It's always a surprise, but I knew I had been nominated. My kids used to tease me whenever the physics Nobel Prizes were announced and I wasn't included. They would say "Uh huh, another year in which you didn't win it." And I would say, " I've done so many things, they can't decide what to give it to me for." That was my standard joke. So I was relaxed. I didn't worry too much about it, because, I was a senior, full professor, I'd gotten lots of awards and recognition. It would be a little icing on the cake. It'd be nice, but I didn't think too much of it.

Then you get this call at six in the morning. My wife picked up the phone, and said "Yes, yes, yes, he's here," and handed me the phone, and muttered something which I won't repeat, because she knew our life would change, at least for a while. It was a gentleman in Sweden notifying me about this award. And you laugh. As soon as I hung up, we started laughing. It was a great, great emotion. About eight minutes later, it got on the wires, and we started getting calls. About a half hour later, the first friends arrived for champagne. So it was a little party, but it changes your life more than I would have expected.

How so?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Leon Lederman: What I didn't expect the awe with which people treat this thing. I thought it's another prize, great. I'd like to have it, and there's even a check that goes with it. Wow. That's great. A nice party you go to, almost all expenses paid, except for my wife's dresses. But it's more than that. It really has an aura about it. First of all, you become an expert on everything. You get interviewed for, "What do you think about the Brazilian debt, or social security, or women's dresses?" Well there I had an opinion, but those other things I don't know...short as possible! That's part of it, and that you'd better be careful about it. It turned out that if you ever want to do anything in the way of education, for example, or science policy, where you want to change laws or move people to be active, boy then, having a Nobel prize helps a lot! You get into places that normally would be very difficult to get into.

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