‘God Particle’ Physicist Sells His Nobel Prize at Auction
The 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics won by American experimental physicist Leon Lederman sold at auction for $765,002.
The online auction conducted by Los Angeles-based Nate D. Sanders Auctions closed on Sunday evening.
Lederman, 92, and his wife, Ellen, decided to sell the medal after he received a diagnosis of dementia, the Associated Press reported.
Ten Nobel Prizes have been sold at auction, with only two of them put up for auction by a living prize winner.
Lederman won the Nobel Prize for Physics with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberge for their discovery of the muon neutrino, a subatomic particle. He also won the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982 and the U.S. National Medal of Science. He is a member of the board of the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel.
He is credited with coining the nickname the “God particle” for the Higgs Boson subatomic particle, a term which he used in a 1993 book promoting support for the Superconducting Super Collider.
Lederman used his prize money to buy a vacation home in Driggs, Idaho, where he now lives permanently, according to the AP.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO