Maurice Goldhaber
| Maurice Goldhaber | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
April 18, 1911 Lemberg, Austria-Hungary (now Lviv, Ukraine) |
| Died | May 11, 2011 (aged 100) East Setauket, New York, U.S. |
| Residence | United States |
| Fields | Physicist |
| Institutions | Cavendish Laboratory |
| Alma mater |
University of Berlin Cambridge University |
| Doctoral advisor | James Chadwick |
| Known for | Neutrinos and negative helicity |
| Notable 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) |
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.
He was born on April 18, 1911 in Lemberg, Austria now called Lviv, Ukraine.
After beginning his physics studies at the University of Berlin, he earned his doctorate at Cambridge University in 1936, belonging to Magdalene College.
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.
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