Maurice Goldhaber

Austrian-born American physicist, who in 1957 (with Lee Grodzins and Andrew Sunyar) established that neutrinos have negative helicity.

Maurice Goldhaber (April 18, 1911 – May 11, 2011) was an Austrian-born American physicist, who in 1957 (with Lee Grodzins and Andrew Sunyar) established that neutrinos have negative helicity.

Education

After beginning his physics studies at the University of Berlin, he earned his doctorate at Cambridge University in 1936, belonging to Magdalene College.

Career

In 1934, working at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England he and James 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 the University of Illinois in 1938. In the 1940s with his wife Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber he established that beta particles are identical to electrons.

He joined Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1950. With Edward 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 with Hartland Snyder 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 such as electrons, protons 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 particles were composites of just 3 basic particles. He was Director of Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1961 to 1973.

Among his many other awards, he won the National Medal of Science in 1983, the Wolf Prize in 1991, the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize in 1992, and the Fermi Award in 1998.

Maurice Goldhaber's brother Gerson Goldhaber was a professor of physics at the University of California Berkeley; his son Alfred Scharff Goldhaber is a professor of physics at SUNY Stony Brook; his grandson (son of Alfred) David Goldhaber-Gordon is an associate professor of physics at Stanford.

Death

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