Jack Steinberger

Origins and early life

Jack Steinberger was born Hans Jakob Steinberger in Bad Kissingen, Bavaria, on 25 May 1921, into a Jewish family: his father Ludwig Lazarus was a cantor and religious teacher, his mother was Berta May. As Nazism rose and its antisemitism became open, his parents sent him out of the country; he crossed the Atlantic at thirteen with his brother Herbert, and Jewish charities arranged for Barnett Farroll to take him in as a foster child in Illinois. His parents and younger brother followed in 1938.

Work and career

He read chemistry at the University of Chicago, served with the Signal Corps at MIT, and returned on the G.I. Bill to take a doctorate under Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller. Physicists then knew one neutrino, the one that appears in beta decay, and wondered whether the neutrinos produced alongside muons were the same thing. In 1961 Steinberger, Leon Lederman and Melvin Schwartz built large spark chambers at Columbia's Nevis laboratory and set them behind a steel wall at Brookhaven, in a beam of neutrinos from decaying pions.

The neutrinos that got through produced muons — and never an electron. The neutrino tied to the muon was therefore a second, distinct kind, and matter came in families. They published in 1962 and shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics. Steinberger worked at Columbia from 1950 to 1968 and at CERN from 1968 to 1986, and died in Geneva on 12 December 2020.