Many people know now that all matter comes from a basic unit, and that is atoms. However, what if I told you that atoms are made of something even smaller? Atoms are believed to be made of quarks, which there are many types of. Leon M. Lederman was a CCNY alumni who sought to find answers for an atom and ultimately the secret of the universe. He brought up the idea of the god particle, and although he didn’t have evidence of this particle, the idea itself led to its own discovery much later in the future.
Leon M. Lederman was a very accomplished man and graduated from The City College of New York in 1943, earning his bachelor’s degree in science. He then enlisted in the United States Army in that same year and planned to become a physicist. Soon after, he enrolled at Columbia University in 1946 after he was discharged and received his Ph.D. in 1951. Throughout his life, he taught at many schools including Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and the Illinois Institute of Technology. He and his team at Fermilab discovered the up quark which is the quark that makes up a proton in 1977. A proton is made up of 2 up quarks and a down quark and a neutron is made up of 2 down quarks and an up quark. In 1979 he took an extended leave of absence to become the director of Fermilab where the Fermilab main injector is and where many quarks were discovered even after his retirement from Fermilab and Columbia University in 1989.
Quarks can’t be explained as something that manipulates their space but rather as something that is manipulated by the field they’re in. Anything that has mass is believed to be made up of atoms and ultimately quarks, but these quarks aren’t the mass themselves, rather they are just particles that are given mass because they are on a particular field. This field is called the Higgs field and exists in every corner of the universe, it is made of the Higgs Boson better known as the god particle. Leon M. Lederman believed that this field was made up of an ultimate particle which he names “The Goddamn Particle” because it was hard to find not because it is a higher being. The irony comes from the misleading name of his book “The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?”. His publishers thought it would be a better idea to remove the damn and keep it the god particle which became a catchy but ultimately misleading name today.
Leon M. Lederman paved the road for the discovery of future quarks and his contribution to physics will forever grow as we use those building blocks to better learn about the universe. After he proposed the idea of the Higgs boson, many people sought after it, and as technology grew better so did the particle accelerators. On the 4th of July 2012, the Higgs boson was discovered in the Large Hadron Collider. As soon as it appeared it scattered into different smaller quarks, but it was enough to prove its existence and proof that Leon M. Lederman was right about this “God Particle”. There is no doubt that what Leon M. Lederman discovered and theorized will continue to help future scientists. He named his book “The God Particle: If the Universe Is The Answer, Then What Is The Question” because we always think that there are smaller and smaller masses that create everything around us. However, things aren’t that simple and the universe itself is the force that manipulates particles and not the other way around. I aspire to be like Leon M. Lederman and much like the universe, acts on their own accord and continues to keep asking questions.
