Maurice Goldhaber (April 18, 1911 – May 11, 2011) was an American

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate caus ...

, who in 1957 (with

Lee Grodzins Lee may refer to: Name Given name * Lee (given name), a given name in English Surname * Chinese surnames romanized as Li or Lee: ** Li (surname 李) or Lee (Hanzi ), a common Chinese surname ** Li (surname 利) or Lee (Hanzi ), a Chinese s ...

and Andrew Sunyar) established that

neutrino A neutrino ( ; denoted by the Greek letter ) is a fermion (an elementary particle with spin of ) that interacts only via the weak interaction and gravity. The neutrino is so named because it is electrically neutral and because its rest mass ...

s have negative helicity.

Early life and childhood

He was born on April 18, 1911, in

Lemberg Lviv ( uk, Львів) is the largest city in Western Ukraine, western Ukraine, and the List of cities in Ukraine, seventh-largest in Ukraine, with a population of . It serves as the administrative centre of Lviv Oblast and Lviv Raion, and is o ...

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

, now called

Lviv Lviv ( uk, Львів) is the largest city in western Ukraine, and the seventh-largest in Ukraine, with a population of . It serves as the administrative centre of Lviv Oblast and Lviv Raion, and is one of the main cultural centres of Ukraine ...

Ukraine Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...

to a Jewish family. His son Alfred Goldhaber is a professor at the

C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics __NOTOC__ The C. N. Yang Institute of Theoretical Physics (YITP) is a research center at Stony Brook University. In 1965, it was the vision of then University President J.S. Toll and Physics Department chair T.A. Pond to create an institute for th ...

at SUNY Stony Brook. His grandson, David Goldhaber-Gordon is a Physics Professor at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

Education

After beginning his physics studies at the

University of Berlin Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (german: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a German public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin. It was established by Frederick William III on the initiative o ...

, he earned his doctorate at

Cambridge University , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

in 1936, belonging to

Magdalene College Magdalene College ( ) is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was founded in 1428 as a Benedictine hostel, in time coming to be known as Buckingham College, before being refounded in 1542 as the College of St Mar ...

Career

In 1934, working at the Cavendish Laboratory in

Cambridge, England Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge became ...

he and

James Chadwick Sir James Chadwick, (20 October 1891 – 24 July 1974) was an English physicist who was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the neutron in 1932. In 1941, he wrote the final draft of the MAUD Report, which inspi ...

, through what they called the nuclear photo-electric effect, established that the neutron has a great enough mass over the proton to decay. He moved to the

University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univer ...

in 1938. In the 1940s with his wife

Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber (July 14, 1911 – February 2, 1998) was a German-born Jewish-American nuclear physicist. She earned her PhD from the University of Munich, and though her family suffered during The Holocaust, Gertrude was able to esca ...

he established that beta particles are identical to electrons. He joined

Brookhaven National Laboratory Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory located in Upton, Long Island, and was formally established in 1947 at the site of Camp Upton, a former U.S. Army base and Japanese internment c ...

in 1950. With

Edward Teller Edward Teller ( hu, Teller Ede; January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb" (see the Teller–Ulam design), although he did not care for ...

he proposed that the so-called "giant-dipole nuclear resonance" was due to the neutrons in a nucleus vibrating as a group against the protons as a group ( Goldhaber-Teller model). He made a well-known bet with

Hartland Snyder Hartland Sweet Snyder (1913, Salt Lake City – 1962) was an American physicist who along with Robert Oppenheimer calculated the gravitational collapse of a pressure-free sphere of dust particles as described by Einstein's general relativity, and f ...

in about 1955 that anti-protons could not exist; when he lost the bet, he speculated that the reason anti-matter does not appear to be abundant in the universe is that before the Big Bang, a single particle, the "universon" existed that then decayed into "cosmon" and "anti-cosmon," and that the cosmon subsequently decayed to produce the known cosmos. In the 1950s also he speculated that all

fermions In particle physics, a fermion is a particle that follows Fermi–Dirac statistics. Generally, it has a half-odd-integer spin: spin , spin , etc. In addition, these particles obey the Pauli exclusion principle. Fermions include all quarks and ...

such as

electrons The electron ( or ) is a subatomic particle with a negative one elementary electric charge. Electrons belong to the first generation of the lepton particle family, and are generally thought to be elementary particles because they have no ...

protons A proton is a stable subatomic particle, symbol , H+, or 1H+ with a positive electric charge of +1 ''e'' elementary charge. Its mass is slightly less than that of a neutron and 1,836 times the mass of an electron (the proton–electron mas ...

and neutrons are "doubled," that is that each is associated with a similar heavier particle. He also speculated that in what became known as the Goldhaber-Christie model, the so-called

strange particle A strange particle is an elementary particle with a strangeness quantum number different from zero. Strange particles are members of a large family of elementary particles carrying the quantum number of strangeness, including several cases where the ...

s were composites of just 3 basic particles. He was Director of

from 1961 to 1973. Among his many other awards, he won the

National Medal of Science The National Medal of Science is an honor bestowed by the President of the United States to individuals in science and engineering who have made important contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of behavioral and social scienc ...

in 1983, the Golden Plate Award of the

American Academy of Achievement The American Academy of Achievement, colloquially known as the Academy of Achievement, is a non-profit educational organization that recognizes some of the highest achieving individuals in diverse fields and gives them the opportunity to meet ...

in 1985, the

Wolf Prize The Wolf Prize is an international award granted in Israel, that has been presented most years since 1978 to living scientists and artists for ''"achievements in the interest of mankind and friendly relations among people ... irrespective of nati ...

in 1991, the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize in 1982 (shared with

Robert Marshak Robert Eugene Marshak (October 11, 1916 – December 23, 1992) was an American physicist, educator, and eighth president of the City College of New York. Biography Marshak was born in the Bronx, New York City. His parents, Harry and Rose Marshak ...

), and the Fermi Award in 1998. He was an elected member of the United States

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

, the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

, and the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...

. Maurice Goldhaber's brother

Gerson Goldhaber Gerson Goldhaber (February 20, 1924 – July 19, 2010) was a German-born American particle physicist and astrophysicist. He was one of the discoverers of the J/ψ meson which confirmed the existence of the charm quark. He worked at Lawrence Be ...

was a professor of physics at the

University of California Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant univ ...

; his son Alfred Scharff Goldhaber is a professor of physics at SUNY Stony Brook; his grandson (son of Alfred) David Goldhaber-Gordon is a professor of physics at Stanford.

Death

Goldhaber died May 11, 2011, at his home in East Setauket, New York at 100.

Legacy

In 2001,

created the Gertrude and Maurice Goldhaber Distinguished Fellowships in his honor. These Fellowships are awarded to early-career scientists with exceptional talent and credentials who have a strong desire for independent research at the frontiers of their fields.Goldhaber Distinguished Fellowships
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References

* G. Feinberg, A.W. Sunyar, J. Weneser, ''A Festschrift for Maurice Goldhaber'', New York Academy of Sciences (1993),

External links

BNL celebrates Goldhaber's 90th year

{{DEFAULTSORT:Goldhaber, Maurice 1911 births 2011 deaths American physicists American nuclear physicists Austrian physicists Austrian nuclear physicists National Medal of Science laureates Enrico Fermi Award recipients Wolf Prize in Physics laureates Jews from Galicia (Eastern Europe) Austrian Jews American people of Austrian-Jewish descent Jewish American scientists People from the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria Scientists from Lviv Alumni of Magdalene College, Cambridge Brookhaven National Laboratory staff American centenarians Austrian centenarians Men centenarians Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences People from East Setauket, New York Jewish physicists Scientists from New York (state) 21st-century American Jews Austrian emigrants to the United States Members of the American Philosophical Society Presidents of the American Physical Society