Nobel Winner Gets $38 Ticket For Jaywalking

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman has found out why local folk don’t jaywalk. He was issued a $38 ticket for crossing a downtown street midblock.

Lederman, director emeritus of the Fermi National Laboratory in suburban Chicago, says he’ll pay up for his violation Friday.

“I jaywalked just like I do in Chicago, New York, Paris or London,” said Lederman, one of hundreds of scientists here for the annual convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He said he may have gotten off on the wrong foot with the police officer who cited him. She asked him what kind of scientist he is.

“She was already writing” when he answered that he is a physicist, Lederman said, but wrote more quickly then, noting that physics was her worst subject in school.

“I did better in chemistry,” he quoted her as saying.

Lederman, an experimental physicist, was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1988.