The letter begins with a list of possible recipients: Dear cousin, professor, best friend, colleague, sir or madam, old flame, occupant, or member of the Swedish Academy.
When physicist Leon Lederman won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1988, he found himself responsible for writing thank-you notes to a couple of hundred well-wishers. In his typical cheeky fashion, Lederman composed a form letter to cover his bases.
“I had to send it to about four old flames,” Lederman said. “They all responded with sarcasm: Yeah yeah, thank you very much.”
Lederman sent the same response to everyone who congratulated him, be they friend, former professor, student, someone he couldn’t possibly remember, or someone he had never met.
“I didn’t actually send it to the Swedish Academy,” he said.
Lederman was serving as director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., when he received the famous 6 a.m. phone call from Sweden. At the time, he jokingly told his wife, “It’s probably the Nobel Prize Committee.”
Once he discovered who was on the other line, the party began. “By 8 a.m. my house was filled with people with champagne bottles and Pepsi cola.”
Lederman said he had heard rumors that the Academy might ring some day. But almost three decades had passed since he took part in discovering the muon neutrino at an experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, NY.
"I was a little surprised it was for neutrinos," said Lederman, who also worked with a team at Brookhaven that discovered the long-lived neutral K-meson; participated in an experiment that showed interactions involving the weak force can violate symmetry; and led the team at Fermilab that discovered the bottom quark.
"So I'm still waiting," he joked.
If Sweden ever phones again, acquaintances sending cards, flowers or candy will be sure to hear from this best friend, old teacher, cousin, colleague, recipient, and old flame, Leon M. Lederman.
