Steinberger, Jack

Steinberger, Jack (Hans Jakob Steinberger), 1921–2020, American physicist, b. Kissingen, Germany, Ph.D. Univ. of Chicago, 1948. He and a brother were sent to the United States in 1934 as the Nazis rose to power; the rest of the family joined them later. He was a professor at Columbia from 1950 until 1971, and worked at CERN from 1968. In the early 1960s, Steinberger and co-researchers Leon Lederman and Melvin Schwartz developed the neutrino beam method to study weak interactions and then discovered a previously unknown type of neutrino (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 work.

See his Learning about Particles (2004).

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