Nobel Prize

New York City in the period of 1922 to 1979 provided the streets, schools, entertainment, culture and ethnic diversity for many future scientists. I was born in New York on July 15, 1922 of immigrant parents. My father, Morris, operated a hand laundry and venerated learning. Brother Paul, six years older, was a tinkerer of…

Presentation Speech by Professor Gösta Ekspong of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics jointly to Dr Leon Lederman, Dr Melvin Schwartz and Dr Jack Steinberger. The citation has the following wording,…

  description of the weak force was incomplete. According to his theory the probability for a reaction at very high energies could exceed 1, which is impossible. It was therefore important to study the weak force at high energies, but the problem was how! It was possible to produce beams of particles with high energy,…

Having been born in 1932, at the peak of the great depression, I grew up in difficult times. My parents worked extraordinarily hard to give us economic stability but at the same time they managed to instill in me two qualities which became the foundation of my personal and professional life. One is an unbounded…

  The neutrino is the most elusive of the known elementary particles. It has no electric charge and, as far as we know, no rest mass. The neutrino hardly interacts with matter at all. It can go through lead with a thickness of 10 000 billion kilometres (one light year) without interacting. The neutrino interacts…

I was born in Bad Kissingen (Franconia) in 1921. At that time my father, Ludwig, was 45 years old. He was one of twelve children of a rural ‘Viehhändler’ (small-time cattle dealer). Since the age of eighteen he had been cantor and religious teacher for the little Jewish community, a job he still held when…

  There are four fundamental forces acting in nature: the gravitational force, the electromagnetic force, the strong and the weak force. If one compares the strength of the different forces, setting the gravitational force at 1, the proportion becomes:   the gravitational force 1   the weak force 1031   the electromagnetic force 1036  …

    The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, (press release). L. Lederman, The two-neutrino experiment, Scientific American, March 1963, page 60. New Scientist, 29 October 1988, page 30. Discovery of two kinds of neutrinos. Adventures in experimental physics, editor Bogdan Maglich, Oct 1972, page 81.  

  Matter is composed of two types of particles, leptons and hadrons. The hadrons are constructed of quarks, while the leptons do not seem to be constructed of other constituents. As the experiment of the Nobel Prize winners so convincingly showed, the leptons are grouped in pairs. This grouping into pairs also occurs for the…

  In order to understand how the weak force works and to explore the possible existence of two neutrinos, it was necessary to study neutrino interactions at high energies. Leon Lederman, Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger were working to achieve a sufficiently intense neutrino beam for several years. This neutrino beam was produced in several…