- In 2015, he decided to auction off his Nobel medal, in part to raise awareness of physics.
- He shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1988 for his part in the discovery of the muon neutrino, a subatomic lepton elementary particle. This was accomplished at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. His co-laureates are Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger.
- He coined the phrase "the God particle" to describe the Higgs boson.
- He majored in chemistry at the City College of New York. Then he served as an officer in the Army Signal Corps during WWII.
- After winning the Nobel Prize, he taught freshmen at the University of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology. He introduced a course called "physics for poets," aimed at students majoring in the humanities.
- He received a master's and a doctorate in physics from Columbia. He taught there until 1979, when he became director of Fermilab.
- He served as the director of the country's largest particle accelerator, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Batavia, Illinois. There, he created a program called "Saturday Morning Physics," in which senior scientists worked with high school students.
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