Nobel Prize Winner Leon Lederman, credited with coining the term ‘The God Particle’, has passed away at the age of 96, having been forced to sell his medal to cover his medical expenses.
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Born in 1922, Lederman earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry before serving for three years in the US Army during World War II. After the war, he earned a PhD in particle physics and later become the director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory from 1978 to 1989. It was near the end of this time as director that he coined his most famous, and controversial, phrase.
Lederman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988 for ‘extraordinary contributions to our understanding of the basic forces and particles of nature’ in his work discovering another subatomic particle: the muon neutrino. This and Lederman’s later work were critical to the eventual confirmation of the Higgs boson, the elementary particle that exerts the Higgs field which gives particles mass, in 2012.
He would later publish “The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What is the Question?” in 1993. The phrase was controversial among the scientific community, but Lederman maintained that it was in reference to the significance of the discovery not the actual characteristics of the particle itself.
In 2011, Lederman and his wife moved into a cabin they had bought with the prize money before his diagnosis with dementia in 2015. His health deteriorated over the course of the next seven years and he was forced to auction off his Nobel medal for $765,000 to help cover the medical expenses incurred during his treatment for dementia.
“It’s terrible,” Leon’s wife Ellen Lederman told NBC News at the time. “It’s really hard. I wish it could be different. But he’s happy. He likes where he lives with cats and dogs and horses. He doesn’t have any problems with anxiety, and that makes me glad that he’s so content.”
Other Nobel prizes have been sold posthumously by the families of deceased Nobel Prize winners. Lederman is only the second to sell his own prize during their lifetime.
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