Melvin Schwartz · Science & Medicine
Physicist; discovered the muon neutrino, Nobel Prize 1988
2 November 1932, New York — 28 August 2006
New York, Stanford
Melvin Schwartz is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Physicist; discovered the muon neutrino, Nobel Prize 1988
Origins and early life
Melvin Schwartz (1932-2006), a Jewish boy who grew up in New York in the Great Depression, found physics at twelve at the Bronx High School of Science. He took his bachelor's degree in 1953 and his doctorate in 1958 at Columbia, where Isidor Isaac Rabi headed the physics department, and joined the faculty, becoming full professor in 1963.
Work and career
A suggestion from his colleague Tsung-Dao Lee, freshly crowned with a Nobel at thirty, inspired the experiment of his life: with Leon Lederman and Jack Steinberger he developed the first neutrino beam at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the early 1960s, and with it the three showed that the neutrino born alongside a muon is a distinct particle — the muon neutrino — establishing the doublet structure of the leptons. In 1966, after seventeen years at Columbia, he moved to Stanford, where the SLAC accelerator was just being completed, and in the 1970s he founded and led Digital Pathways.
The neutrino-beam method and the discovery of the muon neutrino brought Schwartz, Lederman and Steinberger the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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Source: Jinfo.org — Jews in Physics
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Physicist; discovered the muon neutrino, Nobel Prize 1988
Source: Jinfo.org — Jews in Physics
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