Interview: Leon Lederman
Nobel Prize in Physics

Was physics your first love, or did you sort of stumble onto it?

Leon Lederman: I think the interest was there from the beginning, and then I came back to it later. I didn't know it was physics at first.

Leon Lederman: When I was a kid, it was science, it was very romantic activities, I read newspaper articles about scientists. It turned out to be physics in retrospect, I didn't know it at the time, I couldn't spell it. I read a book by Einstein, for kids, he wrote it for kids. It was called The Meaning of Relativity - wonderful book. He compared science with a detective story, where you have clues, and the scientist as detective, trying to put things together. False clues, you got to check up on them, make sure they're right. That was a big impression.

Through high school influences, I was attracted to chemistry. So I went to college and majored in chemistry, and then went back to physics in graduate school.

Were there scientists in the family?

Leon Lederman: No. I was the first in my family to go to college. I had an older brother who was a very big influence on me, but he never finished high school. He had magic hands, rigged up a laboratory in the basement, and he let me help him. I would do all the chores he was supposed to do if he would let me watch him do his experiments.

What was he like?

Leon Lederman: He was a little wild, I think. That's probably why he never finished high school, but he was a terrific influence for me.

Leon Lederman: (My brother) liked to do experiments. He would collect all kinds of equipment -- electricity, chemicals from the drug store. Occasionally, somehow he'd get hold of a chemistry set, and we had a flash of opulence. And he loved to do things, and he'd make things work, and I loved to watch him, and I think that was a strong influence on me. It sort of introduced me to things and how they work, and that was impressive. So I think that he probably disposed me toward chemistry, and in high school the chemistry teachers were more fun. So there I was a chemist.

Why did that change?

Leon Lederman: In College I majored in chemistry, but I also took a lot of physics courses. Then I won the war, one of those wars, I forget which one. I spent three years in the army, thinking about what I'd do when I finished and went to graduate school. When I finished military service, I decided physics was more fun. Why? Because the kids who were in physics happened to be more fun than the kids I met in chemistry. So when I got out of the army, I applied to graduate schools in physics.

What did your parents do?

Leon Lederman: My father was a storekeeper, and my mother raised the kids. They were first-generation immigrants in New York.

Where did they come from?

Leon Lederman: They both came from the former Soviet Union, before it was the Soviet Union. They emigrated separately, and met here when they were a bit older. Kind of a standard story for a New Yorker.

You said neither of them had a college education?

Leon Lederman: They never had the chance. My mother was sent here by her family because things were very dangerous where they lived at the time. She was only twelve years old, and had a tag around her neck with the address of someone in New York who expected her. She worked as soon as she could, but really never had an education. My father was politically active, and was one jump ahead of the Tsar's police. He escaped, came here, and immediately had to make a living. One of the wonderful things about the family was that, traditionally, learning was revered. Even though they didn't have it, they wanted their kids to have it.

Did they live to see some of your achievements?

Leon Lederman: Yes, they did. Not the Nobel Prize, unfortunately, but I was a professor, I was successful, I was winning so many medals it took me a half-hour to transfer them from my jacket to my pajamas every night, and back again in the morning. They lived to see that.

They were supportive of your career, I gather?

Leon Lederman: Oh, yeah. They were ecstatic. They didn't quite expect my career choice I made. My mother's ambition for me was to be a successful dentist. Maybe she had a point, come to think of it.

What person do you think most inspired you, growing up? You mentioned your brother. Were there teachers, or any other people?

Leon Lederman: There were a number of them. I don't think I could single one out. One of the guys that influenced most in high school was a young student who sending himself through college in the evenings, and he worked as a laboratory assistant in the high school. He taught us how to blow glass. We got very friendly with him, and I learned a little about chemistry techniques. He was a chemistry major in college and to us he was a real intellectual. He was the first person I met who was really intent on becoming a professional scientist. That's one example. In college, there were a number of role models around. They weren't people I really got to know, I read about them in the papers.

I remember reading about a famous physicist, Carl Andersen, who won the Nobel Prize in the '30's for discovering the positive electron. I remember a very romantic scene in the newspaper. He had to drag some apparatus up to the top of a mountain and, using the cosmic rays as a source of particles, he discovered this positive electron. To me that whole idea of going up to the top of the mountain to trap a particle was romantic, exciting, and added to this whole mystique.

I was a graduate student at Columbia University, which was one of the greatest departments ever in the '40's and '50's and '60's. There were great professors there, like I.I. Rabi, one of the key founders of modern American physics. Before World War II, most Americans had to go to Europe if they wanted a good education in physics. He went to Europe and came back, founded a school, in effect, on the East Coast, and his students spread out over the universities of America. The same thing happened with J. Robert Oppenheimer on the West Coast. Between the two of them, they really started American physics.

It sounds like you were in the right place at the right time.

Leon Lederman: Absolutely. During college, there was a great depression, and we didn't worry about getting jobs, because there weren't any jobs. So you just put it aside. Very few of us picked our subject matter because we thought we were going to get jobs. The depression was so pervasive that we said, "Hey, what are going to be unemployed in?" "I'm going to be unemployed in history, what are you going to be unemployed in?" "Well, I think I'll be unemployed in biology." We really had a free choice, because we didn't worry about what job would give us a big income, or had a good retirement plan.

How did you get along with your classmates? Were you a social type?

Leon Lederman: Pretty much a people type. I wanted to get along with people, and I think I got through college because I had friends who were supportive. It was the same, even more so, in graduate school. I always depended on people to help me, and if I could help them, that would be good. I'm pretty social.

In reading about your discoveries over the years, it becomes clear that you've got to be a team player to be a successful physicist. Isn't that so?

Leon Lederman: More and more, I think that's true. The team idea is still growing. There's still the option of the lonely scholar in his office at three in the morning who gets an idea. Even as a team player that can happen, because a lot of what you do as a team player you do alone. But the first thing you want to do when you get an idea is discuss it. You must talk about it. If you have a team, they know exactly what you're doing. They're on board right away, rather than this frustrating experience where you say, "Hey, I got this great idea," and they say "What are you talking about?"

But you're right that so-called collaborative research is growing in all fields. It's more prominent in subjects like astronomy, or particle physics, or oceanography, where you need large shared facilities, an ocean-going vessel that's fully equipped, or a telescope, or a particle accelerator that costs a few billion dollars. As nature's secrets become more subtle, the apparatus gets more complicated, and you need more team work.

Was there somebody who gave you a first important break in this career?

Leon Lederman: First break? No, it's hard to say. That's not the way it works. When I was a graduate student we were on an ascending curve in the growth of academic research and science. I didn't know it at the time, but it was a time of increasing budgets and increasing interest in science. Most of my professors thought well of me, and they spread the word, so, when I was looking for a position, I had loads of offers. It turned out that it was most convenient for me to stay where I was, because I had initiated some kind of research at Columbia University and, not wanting to lose any momentum, I just stayed where I was. I thought I'd stay there for a few years, and it turned out to be about 27, or so.

What did those professors see in you, that made them want to offer you a job?

Leon Lederman: I had a sense of humor. I think I was the first graduate student there to start a talk by telling a joke. It's amazing how few people use that important idea, that you don't take yourself too seriously, and yet you take the subject seriously. That was my technique. I had a way to see around things. I think humor helps you in that way. What is humor? It's sort of a shock effect that's bizarre, a twist to a story that you tell, and that's the way it is in research.

Leon Lederman: Let's take a metaphor. You have a trunk. And all kinds of combination locks and you know this trunk is important because you found it in an attic. It's covered with cobwebs, and must be really good. People are working on the combinations and you come in, sort of six months later, and they're all working on the combinations, and they have these papers and computer codes, and they're working out, and you say, "Look at all these bright guys. They haven't been able to get into the trunk. There's something they're missing." And you walk around the back -- the back is open. Nobody went to look at the back of the trunk. Well, it's kind of a silly metaphor but, in a way, science can often be that way. You know that a lot of very bright people have been working on a problem. You know there's a solution, right? So, you say, "What is it that they haven't thought about?"

It's that quality of mind that I think I demonstrated as a graduate student. It was a new subject. We were involved in a subject which really was just beginning, and therefore already as a graduate student, I was an expert.

How would you tell someone who knows nothing about your field, what turns you on about it?

Leon Lederman: First of all, let me say that, beauty's in the eye of the beholder. People are turned on by many things in science, or in humanities, or any serious study. As an early graduate student, when it's the time to choose your field of research, you make an important decision. I was committed to physics, but physics has many sub-fields.

Leon Lederman: I had spent three years in the army, and the first year in graduate school's a tough one, because I had forgotten how to study, and I wasn't doing that well, and the classes were very crowded. The professors were just getting back from their own war work, and didn't have much time for counseling. And so I was sort of at loose ends, and depressed, and my course work was poor, and I went around looking for my old college friends -- who were either in graduate school or already had graduated -- to get support, and they supported me. I remember trying to -- several of them were clustered up at MIT, and they said "Why don't you transfer here, and we'll help you?" So I tried to, but my early grades were so bad I couldn't get into MIT. People at MIT are a little embarrassed about that now.

Then I had to make a decision. Which sub-field to go into? There was nuclear physics. There was what's called physics of materials. There was atomic physics, where you studied atoms. The guy who invented the laser was one of the professors at Columbia, and he was working on fields that had to do with that kind of research, which was exciting. There were so many fields it was like being a kid with his nose pressed against the glass of a candy store, looking at all these candies and saying "What's fun?"

Leon Lederman: One of the fields was a brand new field which had to do with what you would call an atom smasher, and we'd call a particle accelerator. Columbia University was building a large atom smasher off-campus. But, they were building one which when it was in operation back in 1951, was the largest atom smasher in the world for a short time before somebody else built a bigger one. That field was brand new to Columbia. I was intrigued by that, that I'd be almost as up on the field as the professors who had determined to bring that subject to Columbia but were not experts. That was exciting, because it was a new field. It was a totally new field. It had to do with "what's inside." That's the title of it, "What's Inside." We know that if you take a small piece of chalk or any material and you start cutting it, you cut it into smaller and smaller pieces. If you keep cutting it and pretend that you can keep on doing this, eventually you get down to something which we call a molecule. This might be a molecule of some kind. Then we notice that a molecule is made of atoms, which are even smaller. It's kind of a zooming down. Now you're getting into sizes which the human eye can't see. So you go molecule, you go atom, then inside the atom it turns out that the atom itself is made of a nuclei and electrons around it. That part of the field was well-known. We were continuing that field into the nucleus of the atoms. So, you go zooming down, down into even smaller dimensions, like, if this whole room were an atom, then in the middle of the room there's a grain of dandruff. That's the nucleus. You zoom down on the grain of dandruff, you look at it, and you say, "What's inside?" So, it was the added business of search, of trying to understand the basic building blocks, which to me was the turn-on.

You eventually came down to what you yourself have described as "just barely a fact."

Leon Lederman: That's a particle that I have a great deal of affection for. That's an answer to a question that goes "How come you won the Nobel Prize, and what did you win it for?"

Here we go. What is a neutrino, and why did you win the Nobel prize for discovering one?

Leon Lederman: We don't have a blackboard here, and without a blackboard, a professor like me feels totally insecure. I don't even have a little piece of blanket I can hold against my cheek under these circumstances. But let's go anyway. What the heck.

Leon Lederman: We learned about what's inside. Inside the nucleus there are protons and neutrons, two of the constituents. Don't panic, they're all right. They don't hurt. We looked inside those, too. But, in the course of this kind of study, we found, for example, something called radio-activity. You've heard about radioactivity. It turns out that radioactivity always involves a mysterious particle which escapes. When you see something radio-active in our research, it's a kind of explosion, a particle explodes and gives rise to other particles. You study these particles that come off from the explosion, and you reproduce what the event was. Now, there are certain guiding principles in all of this that help us. One of them is "the conservation of energy." It says that the total amount of energy should stay the same in any process. Like, if you put 14 people in a room, they can interact with each other, they can yell at each other, scream at each other, but hopefully, at the end of the day, there are still 14 people. The number of people is conserved in that sense. In the same way energy, if you keep track it, it should balance. And in these reactions, it didn't balance. Something was missing. For awhile, physicists jumped out of second story windows, they got very upset because they really loved conservation of energy, and it looked as if they were going to lose it as a principle, until somebody said, "Maybe there's a particle escaping. Let's assume it is, and since it doesn't show up in our apparatus, it must be electrically neutral, and because it doesn't show up for other reasons, it must be very small. So they used the diminutive ending, "ino," which is Italian. It's a little, little guy, so a neutral, little particle.

Leon Lederman: It became a very mysterious particle head. The neutrino had no electric charge, it turned out that its mass was almost zero, if not zero. Even today in 1992, we think the neutrino may have zero mass, or if it has any mass, it's a teensy, weensy amount of mass, not much. Lots of particles are detected because they make collisions. A proton hitting into some piece of lead three inches thick will never get through the lead because it will hit something, some other nucleus and be stopped. Neutrinos didn't have this ability to collide, so it didn't seem to have any forces. So here it is, almost not even a thing. It had no charge, no mass, no strong force, and yet, we knew it was robbing energy from reactions and it was very important. As we got to know more and more about it, it became crucial.

Leon Lederman: For example, why does the sun keep shining? The sun has been around for four billion years, and there was no mechanism which would keep it shining, unless neutrinos were involved. So whereas it became harder and harder to come to grips with the reality of neutrinos, conceptually, it kept taking an increasing important role in our understanding of important processes like the sun shining, like radioactivity. In the late 1950s, the neutrino was becoming an increasingly irritating concept, which we had to come to grips with. It was confusing us. There was data that was contradictory, it didn't make any sense. There were reactions that should have taken place, but didn't take place. That's when a group of us at Columbia came on the idea that we should actually see, try to detect neutrino collisions.

Leon Lederman: Now that's a hard job because if you try to calculate, using the best information we had, how much material, let's say steel, how thick of steel wool do you need if a given neutrino coming into a steel wall should have a very good chance of never getting out? How long does that steel wool have to be? Ten feet, 100 feet, a mile, ten miles? Turned out the answer is 100 million miles. So, we went to the authorities and we said "We need one hundred million miles of steel. We want to catch neutrinos." No, of course, we didn't do that! We thought more clearly, and it turns out, if you have two neutrinos, you only need half that thickness. And if you have a billion neutrinos, or a billion, billion neutrinos, then you might need a kind of detector that you could think of building. It would still have to be very massive and detailed. It turned out that we hit on a way of doing this with a detector which, for that time, the 1960s, was very massive. It was ten tons of material, and it's not just ten stupid tons of steel sitting there. You had to look inside to see the collision. So it had to be, in some sense, semi-transparent. Anyway, the experiment was wildly successful. We discovered, in fact, that they weren't one neutrino, but there were two kinds of neutrinos, and that's what was giving us all the confusion. The number of neutrinos was doubled. And that, these two types of neutrinos really set us on a road towards what we now call the "standard model," a compact summary of all of this data that I've been telling you about. The data - lots of data that came out in the laboratories all over the world since 1960. So it became known as the "two neutrino experiment." Of course, when you tell somebody who's not a scientist about two neutrinos, they say it sounds like an Italian dance team. "Ladies and gentlemen, we now have the Two Neutrinos!"

That's the story, and eventually it came to the attention of the King of Sweden, and we were invited to a great party in Stockholm.

Could you say in lay person's terms, what happened as a result of that Nobel prize winning discovery?

Leon Lederman: You can't take it by itself. You have to say it's part of a pattern. It's part of a search for an understanding of how the world really works.

Metaphor is useful in this. Suppose Johnny was given an assignment by his teacher:

Leon Lederman: "What makes a library work? What are the common, simplest elements that make up a library?" Let's take that. A library is a complex thing. My metaphor would be, just to warn you ahead of time, the library is like the universe. So Johnny goes says, "What a nuisance." He goes to the library and says, "It's obvious. A library is made of books. Books make a library." But, then he remembers the teacher said, "What's the simplest ingredients?" He sees a lot of books: fat books, skinny books, tall books, short books, profound books, stupid books, the library has all the books. So he says, "It must be something simpler than books." And he looks inside books. Books are made of chapters, chapters are made of paragraphs, paragraphs are made of sentences -- not getting anywhere, really -- and then he sees the sentences are made of words. And then he remembers that at the entrance to the library, there's a big, fat collection of words. Presumably that collection of words, which is called a dictionary, if you put those words together in different ways, you make all the books. You need a set of rules, right? What are the rules by which you put the words together? Let's call the rules "grammar." So with that dictionary and the rules, which we call "grammar," we can make all the books in the library. And, then Johnny says, "Now, I got it." Except that he begins to worry because he remembers "simple." The teacher said it has to be simple, and the dictionary book with all the words is very thick, right? This is a real big, well to-do library. So he says, "What else is there? Ah, I got it! Every one of those words is made up of only 26 letters. So if I have 26 letters, and a new set of rules -- we'll call those rules spelling -- my 26 letters and spelling will make all the words in the dictionary, and all the words in the dictionary will make all the books in the library."

Leon Lederman: So he's very happy, he goes home, starts writing it up, when his baby sister comes and says, "What're you doing?" He doesn't want to be annoyed, but he knows he's going to get punished if he doesn't treat his sister with a certain amount of respect, so he explains the assignment. And he says, "Look, it's 26 letters. Just imagine just how simple it is: 26 letters, spelling and grammar make all the books in the library, and she says, "You're stupid," and now he's nervous because when she says that, he knows there's something. She's very bright. He says, "What do you mean?" She says, "All you need is a zero and a one." He realized, of course. Why shall the child show us? Children these days grow up with digital toys in their cribs, and they know about zeros and ones before the older people. For grown-ups who don't know about zeros and ones, you can use Morse code, which is a dot and a dash. But a zero and a one, or a dot and a dash, with a new rule, maybe Morse code or a computer algorithm, you can make all 26 letters. So now the story is, the library universe can be explained by just two things, a zero and a one, put together by a certain set of rules which make the letters, which make the words, which make the sentences and the paragraphs and the books in the library. So the neutrino turns out to be, we think, one of those ingredients. It turns out, we can't get away with only two. Oh, to end the story, if the zero and the one can't be taken apart, so far, we've taken everything apart, the books into chapters and paragraphs and words and letters, and now we have a zero and a one. If the zero and the one can't be taken apart, you've got the bottom line. You've got the primordial building blocks of the library.

Leon Lederman: The question is "what works for the universe," and it turns out there are certain basic particles. We now believe that, by a consensus, which doesn't mean it's right, it just means that it's our current belief that we've gotten the zeros and the ones for the universe in which we live, and the neutrino is one of those crucial particles. So, that's the significance. It doesn't help us cure the common cold. It doesn't help us gain economic advantage over our competitors. It's pure knowledge. It's understanding the universe in which we live, a subject which really started science. It was when the ancients looked up at the sky, and saw the seasons, and looked at the variety of materials, air, water, fire, earth, and so on, they said, "This is all very complicated." And then they said, "There must be something simple behind it all." It's that old, Greek notion of simplicity that has developed the subject of science. We've been on that road from that early 2500 year ago idea to the present time in learning how the universe works. You if say, "It's expensive," and it is expensive. The counter-argument is that in the course of following that road, we changed the way people live because we invented all kinds of things. Mechanics and electricity and lasers, and all the things that fuel modern society came out of that quest for how the library works.

A writer in Scientific American brought up a very interesting practical ramification in relation to your work. He asks, "Do neutrinos have mass? If they do, could the gravitational attraction of myriad neutrinos keep the universe from expanding forever and becoming a cold, dark void?" That would be nice.

Leon Lederman: Yes. Neutrinos may have an interesting role to play in the greater scheme of things. But, again to answer that question for the kid who's curious, you have to say, "Why? What has this got to do with the universe?" And, in fact, it has a lot to do with the universe. It turns out, if we want to understand the universe, which means the stars and the galaxies, and all the great big things, we have to know the small things. That's what we call "the inner space-outer space connection." We have to know about the small things in order to understand how the big things work. That particular example is a very fascinating one. We know that the universe is expanding as if there were an explosion roughly 15 billion years ago. It's called, the Big Bang. In that explosion, all the matter in the universe spewed out and space and time, radiated. Got bigger and bigger and bigger. Now the question is, will this continue forever? Or will it slow down because gravity is an attractive force? Gravity says "Come back, come back!" How strong is gravity compared to the initial explosive force? That's an issue. That depends. It's an experimental issue. We can find this out. It depends on how much mass there is. The more mass, the more gravity. If we add up all the mass, count all the stars we can see with the most powerful telescopes, we estimate how much mass they have, we can calculate whether we have enough mass to slow up the expansion. When we do, we find we don't have nearly enough mass. But, on the other hand, there are the neutrinos. We know they're there because we know enough about the big explosion to know that it spewed enormous number of neutrinos around. The neutrinos themselves would have no impact on the expansion if they have zero mass. On the other hand, if it's not zero, but teensy-weensy, but not zero, just a small amount, then the neutrinos might act to break the expansion, slow it down. So, the issue then after we discovered the neutrino, was to see whether in fact, since the 1960s, we now know that in the universe, in nature, there are three neutrinos. Part of the zeros and ones is there are three different kinds of neutrinos. We don't know very much about the masses. If they have a small mass, they can act to change the future of the universe. Those are experiments one can do.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

You've devoted a lot of your energy and time in recent years to teaching ,and to teaching teachers. Why is that important to you?

Leon Lederman: Teaching has always been important to me.

Leon Lederman: I grew up at, as I mentioned at Columbia University, which happened to be a university -- and especially a physics department -- dedicated to doing a good job in teaching. And so we had that tradition. We were teachers, we taught. Sometimes, if you were very busy in a laboratory, you could get off a semester, but then you'd have to teach twice as much the next semester. And we didn't object to that. We liked that idea, and I was trained with that. And you're always teaching. You're teaching graduate students in combat, and you're learning from them. Teaching is always a teaching/learning process. If you don't learn when you're teaching, then you're not doing it right.

So teaching was a big thing for me from the beginning.

Leon Lederman: When I left Columbia to become an administrator of a large laboratory, I started suffering withdrawal symptoms. You know, twitching, and saying, "Gee, I got to teach something." And so I started bringing in high school kids to teach them things. And then I learned that they were themselves, very frustrated because high school teachers often couldn't handle bright kids. Little by little, one thing led to another, and I got into looking at the whole educational structure. And so I did a lot of work with gifted kids, on the one hand, out in the boonies of the state of Illinois, and then I moved to Chicago about four years ago, and began to be interested in what we could do about a public school system in a large city.

Everybody knows, these days, that the American educational system is in bad shape.

Leon Lederman: Our system for educating kids over the last 20 years has declined dangerously. Our kids are not learning, and they're certainly not learning math and science. The net result is: the number of kids who are going into math and science is declining. If not for foreigners, we'd be in bad shape in this country, you know, in the training of engineers, mathematicians, scientists, technicians.

There have been a lot of studies, hundreds of reports, but very little action. One of the places it hurts the most is in the inner cities. I'm now talking about it from the point of view of the well-being of the nation. I'm not talking about compassion or fairness. Put that aside for a moment, it might move you.

Leon Lederman: We're not going to have a good time in this country in manning the kind of work force we need, which is much more technological than ever, if we don't attract people that have never gone into science, traditionally. And, those are minorities, women, handicapped. These are untapped sources of people which we need. We have to desperately, do this.

So, here's the big city of Chicago, with 400,000 kids, and the number of those who go into science is very small. Why"? There are many reasons, and everyone has their own favorite reasons, but what we saw is that the teachers are not trained in math and science. There are exceptions, I'm talking very generally. But especially in the early grades, where teachers have to teach everything, the preparation for math and science is very poor. They're afraid of math and science, and once they are, the kids catch it right away. So we took it on, as a job. Some people from the universities, and we enlarged our group to include museum directors, and teachers and principals, and scientists from the laboratories, and private sector people -- all the ingredients of a social system that are interested in education.

Leon Lederman: We formed a team. We formed a not-for-profit academy called The Teachers Academy in Chicago, and we were trying to set up a model for changing all the cities in the United States. I mean, my own research is in particle physics, which involves huge accelerators, and we learned from that, that you might as well do it right by doing the whole system. So here we are in the third largest school system in the nation, Chicago, trying to re-train all the teachers. Not a teacher in one school here, or two schools, or ten schools, or fifty schools, but 600 schools, all the teachers in Chicago. Re-train them in ways of teaching math and science that are delightful because it's a wonderful way to start a kid in being interested in learning.

All kids are scientists. They're born scientists. They ask all these terrible questions that nobody can answer because they're scientists. So, what do you do? You beat that curiosity out of them and they stop asking questions. It's very hard to survive that. Our idea was to encourage those questions, re-do the way teachers handle kids. New curricula, new ways of talking to kids, new role for a teacher. The fundamental old role of the teacher was as a fount of all knowledge, and if the teacher shows a weakness that's terrible. In the new way, the teacher is not a fount of all knowledge, just a facilitator. The teacher talks to the kids and listens to the kids, and tries to find out how Johnny or Mary are thinking. That's her goal Not "Is it a right answer or wrong answer?" but the method of thinking. We're learning how to do that, and if we succeed in Chicago, we'll apply it to 25 other schools, and we'll all live happily ever after.

If you were a recruiter for science classes, how would you try to turn on a kid to study science when they think it's scary and complex and hard to memorize?

Leon Lederman: It depends on the age of the kid. The younger the child, the better off you are. Just let the child be natural. Surround the child with curious things which are fun and instructive. Soap bubbles, a little piece of dry ice. If you have a computer, that's wonderful, because a computer can teach, and help you teach. Take them out into the field. Show them living things. These things can be put into a context in which it's as much play as learning. If you excite them with the joy of learning, they begin to do better in their language courses, and so on. The way we pique their curiosity is by imitating how research is done.

Leon Lederman: For second graders, we do an experiment called, "the lifetime of a soap bubble." So we go into soap bubbles with a little bit of water and detergent, or whatever it is, and we get nice, beautiful bubbles, and we let them play with it, and shower their friends. There's a lot of loose things. Then we give them a stop-watch, and we show them how to start and stop the watch. And then, we're going to measure the lifetime of soap bubbles. The hold the wire hoop, they catch the soap bubble, they start. Then the bubble breaks, they stop. They record the time. And then they're told to tabulate the data. That's what a scientist does. So "How many bubbles live between zero and one second, between one and two seconds, between two and three seconds?" So they compile the data. Then, they're told how to graph the data. And they're interested, you know. So you make a graph of the distribution of the life time of soap bubbles. Pretty soon they're graphing it, and in their beautiful street English, one's saying to the other, think of this a second grader saying, "Which is your independent variable?" They're getting into what a scientist does, and having a wonderful time at it.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Is there anything that you haven't done, career-wise or even hobby-wise, that you really have yearned to do? I understand music does a lot for you.

Leon Lederman: I started taking piano lessons some years ago for the first time. There's a whole literature of "music for the older beginner." My music teacher was very enthusiastic. She said, "You must love music to take up piano at your age," and I said "You don't understand. I want to make money!" I had fun. After sort of six or eight months I was really playing stupid little pieces and enjoying them. But it took time and now I want to write books. I wrote one book that was published. It was on the worst-sellers' list for 27 weeks, and I have another book coming out in late Fall, which I think is going to be a real funny book. I always wanted to be a standup comic. I didn't have the talent to do that, but among physicists I'm great, because none of them can tell jokes.

You get to practice on your students all the time.

Leon Lederman: Oh yeah. In the student course card they say "Watch out for his corny jokes, they're awful." I think it's okay. It keeps them awake. What am I going to tell them next? "Hey, Red, wake up that kid sleeping next to you." And Red says, "Why should I? You put him to sleep."

Tell us about your work with Charlie Townes at Columbia. What was he like?

Leon Lederman: Charlie was a great guy. Columbia had some wonderful people at that time. It was just after World War II, and Charlie came to Columbia from Bell Labs. He immediately started a very vigorous research program on atomic physics and spectroscopy. Ultimately, he invented the maser and the laser. He was a tremendous, productive guy. At one point, I think he had 16 graduate students working on different problems. He was the guy I was most tempted to join. I took a class with him and he invited me to do my thesis with him. It was only this new idea and this new accelerator that drew me away from that. Townes was a great teacher and a tremendous active researcher with a lot of energy, and he's still at it! That's really impressive.

What about Murray Gell-Mann, Mr. Quark?

Leon Lederman: Murray Gell-Mann? He was an instructor at Columbia. He came through for about a year at that time. He was a delightful guy to talk to. If he's not the most productive guy of his particular generation, he's probably the prime candidate. The number of breakthroughs that he made has been a tremendous stimulation to the field. You have to have guys like that. You can't say he was the best, but he was certainly, among the most productive physicists in our field.

I gather you have strong feelings about the development of atomic weapons and defense technology. Can you share some of that with us?

Leon Lederman: I was not involved in the Manhattan project, the development of the atomic bomb. I was in the army, and I was working on radar, which is a different subject. The interesting thing is that after the bomb, in spite of the fact that many scientists did not want to use it, scientists felt a tremendous burden of responsibility to maintain communications with the government, and maintain an interest in it.

Charlie Townes invited me to join a group of physical scientists who were advising the government on scientific matters. There's always a problem when you get into high technology and advanced science with an impact on war and peace. I'll give you an example. Suppose the President of the United States wants to know whether to build some complex airplane. Who can he ask? The air force, their experts on airplanes? He can ask the manufacturers, they're experts on airplanes. Who else can he ask?

Physical scientists, or scientists in general, may not know anything about airplanes, but they have the knack and the training to find out very quickly about the technical issues. So this group advised the government on technical issues, and we were ready to address problems that the President wanted solved. I spent ten years working on that.

But I think we're in a different period now. Fundamentally, the scene was set by President Eisenhower in his famous retiring address. Eisenhower warned us about what he called "the military-industrial complex," where huge sums of money have created an entity which wants to continue spending huge sums of money. I think that's what we have to be concerned about as we face a future with totally changed circumstances.

We see the former Soviet Union demolished in many ways. There are still lots of dangers ahead of us, problems of terrorism, of Husseins, and Qadafis that we have to be concerned about. We still haven't dismantled a huge number of weapons. Still, the threat has changed dramatically, but our military budget hasn't changed at all. Imperceptibly. That's a problem Americans have to face in view of all the different needs for education, for science, for rehabilitation a crumbling infrastructure. We've got problems.

What makes a great scientist? What are the qualities that go into success in your field?

Leon Lederman: You have to be arrogant, in a sense, because you're trying to answer very deep questions. You need a certain amount of self-confidence. That's a kinder, gentler word than arrogance. Of course, you've got to have analytical abilities, or experimental abilities, or creativity. Creativity is an interesting quality, because generally it peaks very early in a person's life, and begins to fade away.

Leon Lederman: Many, many great theoretical breakthroughs in physics and mathematics were done by very young people. Of course, you have to know something, so that's experience, and experience grows with age, creativity is declining with age. You've got to find that balance between the two which will give you your peak years of accomplishment. If you have pure creativity, but you don't know anything, it's too bad. Sometimes it's bad to know too much. I remember Wolfgang Pauli, a very famous Austrian physicist, complaining about his own lack of creativity, said, "Ach, I know too much!" You see, if you know too much, then you don't have that fresh view which allows you to see the breakthrough idea.

The forest for the trees?

Leon Lederman: That's right. If your mind is cluttered with the garbage of the work that we know, you're not going to be able to see that crystalline new idea. It was the child who said, "Hey, ma! The Emperor isn't wearing any clothes!" For a creative scientist, it's very good to get started early. Skip things and begin to accumulate the ability to do research. That's what we really keep emphasizing: research experience, even as an undergraduate. Get into the lab and begin to dabble with things a little bit. You don't have to learn everything, but begin to address the basic issues as soon as you can.

Curiosity is important, too.

Leon Lederman: Oh yeah. I think curiosity is important. Ego's important too. You're driven by ego. It's you who are going to find this thing! You can't pretend that it isn't ego. That would be nonsense. You have to understand yourself, and ego is an enormously important drive in all of us. You're a human being, and you want to be recognized. Competitiveness, unfortunately, is there too. One likes to moderate that. Total obsession is important, I think, but you've got to limit it.

More and more, scientists are working in teams, and that becomes a moderating influence. Maybe the total obsession can carry you for the 36-hour day, and the twelve-day week, and the seven-week month, but, at some point you've got to stop and go skiing read a poem, or go see a movie, or do something else to unwind and let your mind relax. You've got to have some other interests. It's not enough to be a totally dedicated scientist. You won't make it.

These days, more and more, you have to interact with other people, and understand their problems. Increasingly, we need women and minorities in science. Given this kind of obsessiveness and total dedication, we have to adjust to the fact that there are complex lives out there. These days, the two-career family is normal. It's no longer true that the man is free to do the science and the woman stays home and takes care of him. That's not always going to work. So if we want scientists, we do have to make important adjustments, institutionally.

Thank you. That was great.

Leon Lederman: Okay.