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Maurice Goldhaber | |
|---|---|
 Goldhaber in 1958 | |
| Born | (1911-04-18)April 18, 1911 |
| Died | May 11, 2011(2011-05-11) (aged 100) |
| Alma mater | University of Berlin Cambridge University |
| Known for | Goldhaber experiment [fr] |
| Awards | Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics(1971) National Medal of Science(1983) Wolf Prize in Physics(1991) J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize(1982) Fermi Award(1998) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physicist |
| Institutions | Cavendish Laboratory |
| Doctoral advisor | James Chadwick |
| Doctoral students | Theodore A. Welton[1] |
Maurice Goldhaber (April 18, 1911 – May 11, 2011) was an Americanphysicist, known for the 1957Goldhaber experiment [fr] (withLee Grodzins andAndrew Sunyar [de]) that established thatneutrinos have negativehelicity.
He was born on April 18, 1911, inLemberg,Austria, now calledLviv,Ukraine to a Jewish family. His great-grandfather Gershon Goldhaber was a rabbi.[2] His son Alfred Goldhaber is a professor at theC. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at SUNY Stony Brook. His grandson, David Goldhaber-Gordon is a Physics Professor atStanford University.
After beginning his physics studies at theUniversity of Berlin, he earned his doctorate atCambridge University in 1936, belonging toMagdalene College.
In 1934, working at theCavendish Laboratory inCambridge, England he andJames Chadwick, 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 theUniversity of Illinois in 1938. In the 1940s with his wifeGertrude Scharff-Goldhaber he established that beta particles are identical to electrons.
He joinedBrookhaven National Laboratory in 1950. WithEdward Teller 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 withHartland Snyder in about 1955 thatanti-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 theBig 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 allfermions[3] such aselectrons,protons andneutrons 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-calledstrange particles were composites of just 3 basic particles. He was Director ofBrookhaven National Laboratory from 1961 to 1973.
Among his many other awards, he won theNational Medal of Science in 1983,[4] the Golden Plate Award of theAmerican Academy of Achievement in 1985,[5] theWolf Prize in 1991, theJ. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize in 1982 (shared withRobert Marshak),[6] and theFermi Award in 1998. He was an elected member of the United StatesNational Academy of Sciences,[7] theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences,[8] and theAmerican Philosophical Society.[9] Although never a Nobel laureate, he was nominated in 1962 byOtto Struve for the Nobel Prize in Physics.[10]
Maurice Goldhaber's brotherGerson Goldhaber was a professor of physics at theUniversity of California Berkeley; his son Alfred Scharff Goldhaber is a professor of physics atSUNY Stony Brook; his grandson (son of Alfred) David Goldhaber-Gordon is a professor of physics atStanford.
Goldhaber died May 11, 2011, at his home inEast Setauket,New York at 100.[11]
In 2001,Brookhaven National Laboratory createdthe 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.[12]
Dr. Goldhaber was director of the Brookhaven lab from 1961 to 1973, overseeing experiments there that led to three Nobel Prizes. His most famous contribution to science's basic understanding of how the universe works involved the ghostly, perplexing subatomic particles known as neutrinos.
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