Top Physicist Explores Changes in Education : Teaching: Leon Lederman says it’s vital that citizens understand science. He uses classroom humor and unique schools to achieve that goal.

In the class they call Physics for Poets, the professor has just finished explaining nuclear fusion.

A hand shoots up. “Can you describe it without using numbers?” the student asks.

That’s the kind of question Nobel Prize-winner Leon Lederman gets frequently since he began teaching a physics course designed for liberal arts majors.

And he loves it.

Here’s the man who shared a Nobel Prize in physics two years ago for his work with subatomic particles, a man whose previous job gave him the power to choose which experiments would be carried out on the world’s most powerful atom-smashing machine.

A man who helped find a quark.

Now, the 68-year-old physicist is lecturing students more comfortable with quatrains than quarks and who probably never heard of him until they got to the University of Chicago.

Lederman asked for the job. He has a passion for teaching.

“I think the progress of civilization is very much dependent on increasing the literacy of the general public,” Lederman said. “This is a democracy. We have votes.”

President Bush set a goal in his State of the Union address this year of making U.S. students first in the world in math and science by the year 2000.

But the most recent international ranking, in 1988, found U.S. high school seniors ninth out of 13 countries in physics, 11th in chemistry and last in biology, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

And the most recent Science Report Card produced for Congress, released in 1988, showed that just 7% of 17-year-olds had the knowledge and skills to perform well in college-level science courses. More than half were deemed to have too little scientific knowledge to participate in the nation’s civic affairs.

Lederman is attacking that record. When he joined the University of Chicago faculty, he specifically asked to teach Physics for Poets.

Among undergraduates, Lederman is viewed as something of a hero and something of a curiosity.

“You wouldn’t expect a Nobel laureate to do something like that,” said William Wolf, a physics student.

With a head of curly white hair, Lederman looks the part of a college professor. But unlike some of his colleagues, he has a sense of humor, constantly cracking jokes in his New York accent. He says he’s driven to teach as much by his need for a stage as his will to educate.

His successor as director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, John Peoples, says Lederman is probably the only Nobel Prize-winning physicist who could make a living as a stand-up comic.

“This is a very serious subject,” Lederman said, “but I don’t have to take myself seriously.”

So he begins his class by clanging a shiny red bell and punctuates his lectures with one-liners and puns--like “freeze a jolly good fellow” in an explanation of cold fusion.

“He can be a little corny,” said freshman Anne Tuttle, who took the course to fulfill a science requirement. But even so, she said: “He makes physics more interesting, more appealing.”

Lederman began his career in 1951 on the physics faculty at Columbia University. In 1979, he took the directorship at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., the U.S. Department of Energy’s high-energy physics lab. There, he oversaw construction and operation of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.

He helped discover two of the 12 smallest subatomic particles that make up the standard model of the structure of matter--the beauty quark and the muon neutrino. It was the 1961 discovery of the muon neutrino that earned Lederman and two collaborators the Nobel Prize in 1988.

He left Fermilab last year to return to teaching after deciding that of all his accomplishments, education had been the most important.

Evidence of his drive to improve science education shows up well beyond the classrooms where he lectures.

* In Aurora, Ill., southwest of Chicago, the nation’s only three-year public, residential high school for exceptional math and science students has graduated its first two classes. Lederman founded the school, the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy.

* On Saturday mornings, 100 high school students converge on Fermilab for “Saturday Morning Physics,” created by Lederman his first year there. Physicists who work at the lab volunteer their weekend mornings to teach gifted Illinois teen-agers. Saturday Morning Physics was the first of about 20 programs for students and teachers now running at Fermilab--all attributable to Lederman’s initiative. The programs will occupy a new $1-million building funded by the Department of Energy.

* In Chicago this summer, a multimillion-dollar academy opened for the city’s 15,000 teachers to improve science and math education in the public school system. Lederman chaired the steering committee and envisions it as the first of 25 such schools around the country. It will hold its first class for teachers on Oct. 15.

“We don’t have enough scientists like him,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy James D. Watkins, who has named Lederman to his new, 28-member Secretary of Energy Advisory Board. Watkins calls it a collection of “the brightest minds in the nation.”

“His mind is so superior that he can go well beyond just science and technology,” Watkins said. “He can go into the whole field of human endeavors. We all cling to him when we want to accomplish something.”

Lederman next plans to reform the basic undergraduate curriculum to give more emphasis to science.

If redefining college education seems an impossible dream, Lederman’s colleagues will tell you that’s not a problem.

“He has this optimism to go places that other people say are hopeless,” said Henry Frisch, a physics professor at the University of Chicago.

Frisch recalls Lederman’s moxie at a meeting several months ago of presidents of universities sponsoring the teachers’ academy.

“He said: ‘We don’t have a building, we don’t have a director, we don’t have money, and we’re going to open Sept. 1,’ ” Frisch said. “Any reasonable person would say: ‘No way.’ ”

Said Lederman: “It’s very optimistic, but why not? Until you fail, you’re a success.”

Leon Max Lederman was the second son of immigrants from Odessa and Kiev who “revered education but didn’t have any of their own.”

He grew up in Manhattan and the Bronx and entered City College of New York, a school that in the ‘30s and ‘40s was, in Lederman’s words, “converting first-generation, second-generation immigrant students into the American Dream.”

His interest in science grew out of watching his older brother experiment in the basement with chemistry, carpentry and “electrical things that sparked and made zaps.”

At City College and as a graduate student at Columbia University under the GI Bill, he gravitated to the physics students.

“There were many very bright guys, and I liked the way they talked, and I liked the way they thought about things,” he said.

In Physics for Poets, Lederman faces a different kind of student, a student whom he watches “glaze over” when he begins working equations.

Lederman responds with comedy. During one lecture, he showed a cartoon by Gary Larson picturing a student who asks his teacher: “May I be excused? My brain is full.”

He provides his students with lecture notes illustrated with stick figures and cartoons. In one set, a diagram of a proton colliding with a lithium atom is illustrated with a Batman-like burst captioned, “POW!” “ouch!” “smash!”

“His attitude is pretty confident that we’ll like physics,” said freshman Naomi Swinton, whose interests lie in urban anthropology. “His attitude is everybody can learn physics and everybody should because there’s so much happening.”