Steinberger, Jack

Steinberger, Jack, 1921–, American physicist, b. Kissingen, Germany, Ph.D. Univ. of Chicago, 1948. He was a professor at Columbia Univ. from 1950 until 1971. In the early 1960s, Steinberger and co-researchers, Leon Lederman and Melvin Schwartz, discovered a new type of neutrino, which is a particle with no detectable electric charge or mass that moves at the speed of light. This led to the development of a new scheme for classifying families of subatomic particles. In 1988, the trio shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2007, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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