Leon Lederman Interview (page: 7 / 8) Nobel Prize in Physics	Print Interview

If you had your druthers, unlimited time, money and energy, what mystery would you most like to crack now?

Leon Lederman: It's what we're doing. We'd just do it faster. It's really a megalomaniacal idea that we can understand the universe, but we're trying to understand. By understand, I mean have a mathematical understanding of how it began, how it evolved. After all, we all live in this universe, and that we want to know how we got here, and where we're going. What's the future of the universe?

This is something we've been working on for 2500 years, and even longer if you go back to the mythological origins of science. There we were dealing with Atlas holding up the world, standing on the back of turtle. What's the turtle standing on? Another turtle. From then on, it was turtles all the way down. We know what problems we're trying to solve? Where's the top quark? There are six quarks, but we've only seen five of them. We've measured all five, but there's a sixth one missing. That's a detail.

The other thing we worry about is tying in the small structures -- the zeros and ones, the quarks and leptons - with the beginnings of the universe, before this big expansion, during the big bang, the mechanisms of the big bang, and, of course, the deepest question of all: What happened before the big bang? What do we mean by space and time? These are the deep questions we're trying to clarify, so that kids will learn them in their second, third, and fourth grade, primitively, at first, then maybe in more detail. This is the road we're on, and sometimes it takes very complicated kinds of equipment.

You've described the path of your own career, and it strikes me that luck may have played a part in it. Do you think so?

Leon Lederman: Oh, without luck, forget it. If you don't have incandescent good fortune, don't be a scientist. You need luck, because a career in science is full of mistakes, bad judgments, missed opportunities, experiments that failed because the equipment doesn't work. That's part of the game. So if you want to be a successful scientist, better make sure you have luck. This may apply to other fields too, but in science you depend on many things. You depend on funding. When I was younger, the money rolled in. Society, at that time, was interested in long term investment. This was the period from the late 1940s to 1970. The, something happened in this country, and we became less interested in our future. People who came of age in the '80's were less lucky than we were. That's one kind of luck, in addition to the luck of the apparatus not breaking in the middle of the experiment, or the accelerator working when it should work. All of that requires luck.

Of course, horse shoes help. There's a famous story of a physicist who had a horse shoe over his lab bench, and someone said, "You don't believe in horse shoes, do you?" And his answer was, "Of course I don't believe in horse shoes. But I hear it helps, even if you don't believe in them."

I'm sure that all these discoveries you made weren't as smooth as they look on paper. Obviously, many, many hours went into it. How do you deal with set-backs? Do you ever have doubts, fears of failure?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Leon Lederman: When you have set-backs, you cry, you saw on your wrists with a butter knife or something, so it doesn't do permanent damage. Yeah, you get depressed, and you work at it, because what else can you do? I think that's probably true. You can get discouraged. They have a lot of discouragement in this. You know, more often than not, things don't work. It's the ordinariness of nature and equipment, and so on, that things don't work. So you get too used to that pretty soon and you know that sooner or later something may work.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Leon Lederman: You've got to be hopeful and optimistic. Often, I remember sitting on the floor of an accelerator with a graduate student, looking at each other accusingly and he would say, "You're the professor, you get it working." I'd say, "You're the graduate student. It's your thesis, you get it working." And then, somehow, by five a.m. or so, between us, we'd find out why it wasn't working. It wasn't plugged in, or something even more significant than that. So we got it working.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

There's always a measure of compromise between failure and occasional success. But when the success comes, it can be terrific. It doesn't always have to be a great discovery; it can be getting some apparatus to work well. I used to have an Italian professor, a wonderful guy who never lost his sense of wonder. He'd come into a room and turn on the toggle switch and the lights would go on, and then he'd turn it off and turn it on again, and say "Ah, splendido! Look at that!" He turns the switch, a lot of lights go on. It's wonderful that that can happen, somehow, by miracles.

What advice would you give to a young kid right now wanting to emulate you, going into science as a career?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Leon Lederman: I love science, and I think the hardest thing for young people is to know what they want. It takes effort to really know what you want. You want an extra income? If you're really interested in becoming wealthy, then you don't want to go into science. It's not impossible, but unlikely that that's a road to wealth. You really have to know what makes you happy and that takes a little effort. What makes you pleasurable? What makes you say, "Thank God it's Monday," instead of "Thank God it's Friday." That's a lot. You're going to spend some vast fraction of your life in your business, whatever it is, whether it's running a lathe, running a corporation, or running an experiment. Therefore, you want to really enjoy that, otherwise it's a dumb thing you're going to do. If you hate to go to work, even though you're making three times as much as a scientist, probably you're life will not be that satisfying. The biggest effort is, know thyself. That's Shakespeare, right? "To thine own self be true." It's not easy, so you've got to have some experiences. I generally advise kids to, you know, take the hardest courses, because that's useful. Aim high, because you can always fall back, but if you aim low, there's nothing to fall back to. You know? Try hard things, and there's always fall-back. You can always do less and still have fun at it. Especially in college: smorgasbord! Try everything. Listen to the best professor, whether it's a Latin professor, or an economics professor.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

Did you always feel that you were going to achieve great things?

Leon Lederman: No. Not at all. I never did. I went into physics to hang around with the bright kids, and not be conspicuous. I wasn't doing anything else and I didn't want to look dumb, so I thought I'd pretend to be a physicist, just like the others. I was very pleased with the fact that I got a job. But everyone was getting jobs, and I was well aware of that for some reason. I lucked out in the supply/demand business. It was five or ten years after my Ph.D. before I realized I was pretty good. I have a little twist in my personality which helped.

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