It turns out that physicists really eat Chinese food every Friday! Sheldon is not lying to me

On July 4, 2012, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced the discovery of the " God particle ". (The Higgs boson is a boson predicted by the standard model of particle physics. It is because of its existence that elementary particles have mass.)

Why is the “God particle” called the God particle?

This has to do with a person - Leon Max Lederman (1922.7.15-2018.10.3), winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics. It was he who gave this particle that gives mass to everything such a household name.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the "God Particle". Let us learn about the physicist who named the "God Particle" through a few short stories .

Leon Lederman was born into a civilian family in New York on July 15, 1922. Leon's parents were Eastern European Jewish immigrants who ran a laundry.

After the outbreak of World War II, Leon became a communications soldier and went to the European battlefield. After the war, he returned to the United States and studied physics at Columbia University.

Lederman likes to tell this joke about his military career:

The sergeant gave a lecture on the metric system to a group of newly enlisted privates.

Sgt: In the metric system, the boiling point of water is 90 degrees.

Soldier: Excuse me, sir, the boiling point of water is 100 degrees.

Sarge: Of course. I was so stupid, it was a right angle that would boil at 90 degrees .

In late 1960, Leon Lederman discovered the muon neutrino , one of the smallest particles making up matter.

At 6 o'clock in the morning on October 10, 1988, the Nobel Committee called to inform him that he had won the Nobel Prize in Physics .

This award came a little late, 27 years apart.

Why are you so late?

After analysis, comparison and verification, Leon Lederman came to the conclusion: " The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences delayed the time because they were not sure which great achievement of mine should be rewarded. "

As a giant in the field of particle physics in the United States after World War II, Leon Lederman has made many achievements, including more than one Nobel Prize-winning achievement. For example, in the 1950s, he proved the parity non-conservation theory of Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang.

Lederman and Tsung-Dao Lee worked together at Columbia University, and Friday was the day when the physics department of Columbia University had lunch. (Their schedules seemed to overlap with Sheldon, Leonard, and others.)

As the person who knows Chinese food best here, Tsung-Dao Lee is about to order the dishes. Later, Lederman recorded it in detail in his world-famous popular science book "The God Particle":

Tsung-Dao Lee orders food in style, it's really an art.

He glanced at the menu and the notepad, asked the waiter a question in Chinese, frowned, picked up the pen and drew a few symbols on the paper. Then he asked another question and made a change on a symbol. In order to get divine guidance, he glanced at the tin relief ceiling, and then he wrote it in one stroke. When he looked at it again, both of his hands stopped on the notepad, one hand with five fingers stretched out, conveying the Pope's blessing to everyone, and the other hand holding the pencil.

It’s all here, a perfect blend of yin and yang, color, fragrance and taste…

It was at this Chinese dinner that Lederman was able to further understand Li and Yang's theory and obtain intelligence. Wu Jianxiong had already begun to verify it, and it seemed to be working well.

Lederman was shocked, and he designed an experiment overnight after returning home, proving the validity of Li and Yang's theory from another perspective. Although he started later, his paper and Wu Jianxiong's paper were published in the same journal with the same manuscript receipt date.

Clearly, Lederman had grabbed a Nobel Prize-winning achievement. He and Chien-Shiung Wu, two experimental physicists, could share in the spoils.

But the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to only two theoretical physicists - Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang.

Lederman later said in The God Particle:

When a farmer wants to find precious and delicious truffles, he will bring a pig to the nearby area. The pig will use its unique skills to find the truffles, but at this time, the farmer will quickly take the truffles away.

Experimental physicists are like this pig, and theoretical physicists are the "cunning" farmers!

There is a mysterious particle in the universe that is believed to give mass to everything. It is called the Higgs boson. If we can find it, humans will be one step closer to the ultimate truth of the universe.

Only by building an accelerator with higher energy can it be possible to capture this particle.

The more energy, the greater the cost, which is why Leon Lederman unkindly calls it the " goddamn particle ".

Later, he wrote a popular science book about the development of human exploration of the truth of physics. The title was originally to be called this, but the collaborator thought it was indecent, so after a slight change, it became the now famous God Particle .

Leon Lederman hopes the government will allocate funds to build a more energy accelerator, the Superconducting Super Collider, to capture the God particle.

He almost succeeded. The collider was initially built, but in 1993 the government abandoned the project.

" Einstein said that the job of a physicist is to 'read the mind of God,'" Lederman complained. "But how can you read the mind of an American congressman? "

It turns out that the most difficult thing to understand is the human heart. It is said that some tunnels of the collider are now filled with rainwater from the rainy season.

Alzheimer's disease, also known as "senile dementia", can even affect the smartest people in the world.

In 2015, Lederman was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. In order to pay for his high medical expenses, his Nobel gold medal was sold for $765,000.

By then, he had forgotten his years as director of Fermilab or what he had done to win the prize. He also had no memory of what he had said when asked if they could take his picture: "Sure. It's just photons."

“ I don’t have any real stories to tell, ” he told visitors. “ I was just sitting on the deck looking at the mountains. ”

On October 3, 2018, Leon Redman passed away at the age of 96.

END

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Editor/Xiao Xitushuo