About Maurice Goldhaber
Maurice Goldhaber (April 18, 1911 – May 11, 2011) was an American physicist and director of Brookhaven National Laboratory. He is known for the discovery that deuteron is made of a neutron and a proton, for first measuring the mass of the neutron and for the Goldhaber experiment that first determined that neutrinos have negative helicity. == Early life and childhood == He was born on April 18, 1911, in Lemberg, Austria, now called Lviv, Ukraine to a Jewish family. His great-grandfather Gershon Goldhaber was a rabbi. After beginning his physics studies at the University of Berlin, he earned his doctorate at Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1936. == Career == In 1934, working at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England he and James Chadwick, through what they called the nuclear photo-electric effect, established that the neutron has a great enough mass over the proton to decay. They showed that the neutron was a new nucleon and measured for the first time the mass of the neutron. He moved to the University of Illinois in 1938. In 1948, with his wife Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber, he devised an experiment to confirm that beta particles are identical to electrons based on Pauli exclusion principle. He joined Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1950.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.