Goldhaber, Maurice, 1911-2011

Maurice Goldhaber April 18, 1911, Lemberg, Austria-Hungary (now Lviv, Ukraine – May 11, 2011, East Setauket, New York; studied physics at University of Berlin, PhD, Cambridge University (Madgalene College); 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; 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; 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; 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; Director of Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1961 to 1973; he won the National Medal of Science in 1983, the Wolf Prize in 1991, the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize in 1982 (shared with Robert Marshak), 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 a professor of physics at Stanford