Steinberger, Jack

Steinberger, Jack,

1921–, American physicist, b. Kissingen, Germany, Ph.D. Univ. of Chicago, 1948. He was a professor at Columbia from 1950 until 1971. In the early 1960s, Steinberger and co-researchers, Leon LedermanLederman, Leon Max
, 1922–2018, American physicist, Ph.D. Columbia, 1951. He was a professor at Columbia until he became director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. (1979–89). He then taught at the Univ.
..... Click the link for more information.  and Melvin SchwartzSchwartz, Melvin,
1932–2006 American physicist, b. New York City, Ph.D. Columbia, 1958. He was on the faculty at Columbia (1958–66, 1991–2000, emeritus 2000–2006) and Stanford (1966–83).
..... Click the link for more information. , developed the neutrino beam method to study weak interactionsweak interactions,
actions between elementary particles mediated, or carried, by W and Z particles and that are responsible for nuclear decay. Weak interactions are one of four fundamental interactions in nature, the others being gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong interactions.
..... Click the link for more information.  and then discovered a previously unknown type of neutrinoneutrino
[Ital.,=little neutral (particle)], elementary particle with no electric charge and a very small mass emitted during the decay of certain other particles. The neutrino was first postulated in 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli in order to maintain the law of conservation of energy
..... Click the link for more information.  (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.

Steinberger, Jack

(1921– ) physicist; born in Bad Kissigen, Germany. He fled the Nazis with his brother and came to the U.S.A. in 1935. After performing research at Princeton (1948–49) and the University of California: Berkeley (1949–50), he joined Columbia University (1950–72). He, L. Lederman, and M. Schwartz shared the 1988 Nobel Prize for their 1960–62 accelerator-created beam of neutrinos and subsequent discovery that neutrinos exist in two types. Steinberger continued his subatomic particle research at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) (1968–86), then became a professor at the Scuola Normale, Pisa (1986).