Jack Steinberger (1921–2020)

Jack Steinberger was born Hans Jakob Steinberger to a Jewish family in Bad Kissingen, a small spa town in Germany. His parents were Berta May and Ludwig Lazarus Steinberger, a cantor and religious teacher, and he had two brothers. In 1934, following the rise of the Nazi regime to power, his parents sent 13-year-old Jack and his older brother Herbert to the USA for safety. He was cared for by Barnett Farroll of Chicago, Illinois, who also helped Jack's parents and younger brother emigrate in 1938. Steinberger attended New Trier Township High School and then studied chemical engineering at the Armour Institute of Technology (now Illinois Institute of Technology). After two years, his scholarship ran out, and he dropped out to work to help support his family. He studied at night at the University of Chicago, graduating with a bachelor's degree in physics in 1942. During World War II, he joined the U.S. Army and was sent to the radiation laboratory at MIT, which was working on the development of radar. After the war, with the help of the G.I. Bill, he went back to the University of Chicago, where he studied under Enrico Fermi and earned his PhD. In 1949, he was invited by Gian Carlo Wick to become his assistant at the Radiation Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. Steinberger left Berkeley a year later because he refused to sign the so-called anti-Communist loyalty oath, and joined the faculty at Columbia University in New York City, eventually becoming a full professor. At Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, he conducted experiments with his colleagues Melvin Schwartz and Leon Lederman that proved the existence of a type of neutrino associated with the muon, distinct from the neutrino produced in beta decay. They published their findings in Physical Review Letters in 1962. In 1968, Steinberger went to CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) in Geneva, Switzerland as director of experimental research in particle physics. He retired in 1986, and became a professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Italy. Steinberger was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics with Schwartz and Lederman in 1988, "for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino." He was also awarded the National Medal of Science in 1988, and received the Matteucci Medal in 1990, from the Italian Academy of Sciences. In 2004, he published his autobiography, Learning About Particles: 50 Privileged Years.