Ten Nobels for the future

Jack Steinberger was born in Bad Kissingen (Germany) in 1921, and in 1934 went to the United States as part of a programme for refugee children fleeing the Nazis. He was later joined by the rest of his family in Chicago, where he attended the Armour Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago on scholarship, receiving his undergraduate degree in chemistry.

Following the entry of the United States into the war, he joined the Army and was sent to MIT to work on radar bomb sights, where he took his first courses in physics. After the war he continued his studies at the University of Chicago with Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller, among others, and he received his Ph.D degree with a thesis on muon decay. He worked for a brief period at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, which was directed by Oppenheimer. In 1949, he became Gian Carlo Wickís assistant at the University of California at Berkeley where he had the opportunity to work on the just completed electron synchrotron, but was forced to leave after only a year, partly because of his refusal to sign the anticommunist loyalty oath.

He moved on to Columbia University, conducting bubble-chamber experiments, also in collaboration with research groups from the Universities of Bologna and Pisa. In 1968 he joined CERN in Geneva. Georges Charpak had just invented proportional wire chambers, offering a much more powerful way to study the decay of specific particles, and new detectors were built at CERN and at Columbia. Jack Steinbergerís experiment at CERN, which extended until 1976, produced a series of important results that confirmed the theoretical model of weak interaction, which underlies the radioactive decay of the atomic nucleus. Meanwhile, he was involved in the design of the CDHS detector to be used for a new neutrino experiment during the period 1977 to 1983. Once again, it resulted in a large body of data which gave decisive quantitative support to a series of theoretical models.

In 1983, Jack Steinberger became the spokesman for a collaboration of 400 physicists engaged in the construction of the Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP), the world's largest particle accelerator. He retired from CERN in 1986, although he still carries out research there, and became part-time Professor at the Scuola Normale in Pisa. In 1988, he received the Nobel Prize for Physics, together with Melvin Schwartz and Leon M. Lederman, for the development of a high-energy neutrino beam which led to the discovery of the muonic neutrino. In 1997, he became a member of the Accademia dei Lincei.

1993
Responsibility
of scientists
on a finite globe

1997
What are high energy physicists for?