Fancy yourself a bit of a collector? Why not add a Nobel Prize to your pool room. It'll only set you back a few hundred thousand dollars.
Retired experimental physicist Leon Lederman, who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of a new atomic particle and was the first person to use the term "God Particle", has put his medal up for auction.
The medal, which is made of 18-carat gold and plated in 24-carat gold, has a reserve price of $325,000. The online auction being conducted by Nate D. Sanders auction house closes on Friday morning.
According to the auctioneers this is one of only 10 Noble Prizes to be auctioned. The Guardian also reported that this was only the second prize to be auctioned while the winner was still alive.
Lederman, now 92, told the Associated Press he was selling his prize because there wasn't much use for it in his log cabin in Idaho.
"The prize has been sitting on a shelf somewhere for the last 20 years," he said.
With his colleagues Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, Lederman discoverd the muon neutrino using a high energy particle accelerator in 1962. The particle is 200 times smaller than an electron.
Lederman, now 92, worked for much of his career at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, Chicago. In 1993 he wrote the popular science book The God Particle: If the Univese Is the Answer, What Is the Question?
In 2014 James Watson's 1962 Nobel Prize for his role discovering the structure of DNA was sold for more US$4.1 million to billionaire Alisher Usmanov. But the Russian entrepreneur bought the medal only to give it back to Watson.
Update: Leon Lederman's Nobel Prize sold for US $765,002, the fourth highest amount ever paid for a Nobel medal.
