Montgomery Fellow Leon Lederman brought his humorous and lighthearted discussion of physics to Dartmouth Hall yesterday, captivating the standing-room-only crowd during his afternoon speech.
Lederman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from Columbia University and the University of Chicago, presented theoretical physics theories using anecdotes, metaphors and jokes.
The speech was about the search to understand the universe's basic elements.
"The history of physics and general science," Lederman said, "is a road that started in ancient Rome and has continued along to the recent discoveries of sub-atomic particles such as quarks and neutrinos."
Lederman constructed a picture of the universe's building blocks, interjecting humor and stories to help illustrate the information. His colorful visual aids, including his own drawings, are a trademark of his lecturing style and a popular part of his book, "The God Particle."
Lederman described what he called the often frustrating and somewhat "miraculous" search for scientific knowledge with a metaphor that drew laughter from the crowd.
"A farmer leads a pig to eat, the pig searches around for the truffles and just as the pig is about to eat the truffles the farmer snatches the truffles away from the pig," Lederman said.
During a question-and-answer session following the speech, an audience member asked Lederman about the effectiveness of his metaphorical "physics for poets" approach.
Lederman replied, "People who read the books may not understand everything ... but it will give them a sense of what the issues are and how science progresses."
Owen Gottlieb, '95, who attended the speech, said he enjoyed Lederman's humor. "It was the most lively science lecture I've gone to."
Lederman, during his visit as a Montgomery Fellow this week, also spoke to physics students in physics classes ranging from a freshmen seminar about chaos theory to upper-level courses.
Ludwig Plutonium, a local resident who believes the universe revolves around a plutonium atom, briefly presented his "Plutonium Atom Totality Theorem" to Lederman during the question-and-answer session.
"That's out of my field of knowledge," Lederman said in response to Plutonium.
