Jack Steinberger was born in 1921 in the spa town of Bad Kissingen in Bavaria. With the rise of the Nazi party, the American Jewish Charities organisation funded 300 child refugees, including Jack and his elder brother, in 1934. Jack was taken in by a Chicago businessman, who put him into the respected New Trier Township High School (to whom Jack donated his Nobel medal) and helped bring Jack‘s parents and younger brother over in 1938. Reunited, the Steinbergers were helped to buy a small delicatessen, and Jack went on to study chemical engineering at the Armour (now Illinois) Institute of Technology until his tuition scholarship expired. He persevered with evening chemistry classes at the University of Chicago and with the aid of a scholarship returned to day classes, earning his degree in 1942. During the war, he worked at MIT making radar bomb sights, and took the opportunity to study basic physics. After the war, he continued his studies at the University of Chicago, mainly under Enrico Fermi, with fellow students including several future Nobel laureates.
Steinberger gained his PhD in 1948, having discovered that cosmic-ray muons decay into three, not two particles. This laid the experimental foundation for the concept of a universal weak interaction, one of the four fundamental forces in nature. He then worked at Princeton under Robert Oppenheimer, and Berkeley, California, before moving on to Columbia University as physics professor in 1950. He stayed there until 1968, then moved to CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.
At Columbia, Steinberger worked at the cyclotron, exploring the properties of pions, and then at the Brookhaven Cosmotron, studying the properties of „strange“ particles using bubble chambers as detectors. In 1961 Schwartz suggested using the new, higher energy proton accelerator named AGS to create a stream of neutrinos – subatomic particles that have no electric charge and very little mass – as a research tool in the study of weak nuclear forces. In the process, they also discovered a new type of neutrino called a muon neutrino and, 27 years later, Lederman, Schwartz and Steinberger received the Nobel Prize in recognition of this experiment.
In 1986, he became part-time professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa but continued to work at CERN until 1995, since when he has maintained his links with the organisation. Of his $140,000 share of the Nobel Prize, Steinberger kept half and split the rest between chicago university and the charities that initially helped him flee Nazi Germany. He is married to biologist Cynthia Alff, with whom he has two children. He also has two sons from an earlier marriage to Joan Beauregard.
This text and the picture of the Nobel Laureate were taken from the book: "NOBELS. Nobel Laureates photographed by Peter Badge" (WILEY-VCH, 2008).
Picture: © Peter Badge/ Foundation Lindau Nobelprizewinners Meetings at Lake Constance |