Maurice Goldhaber

Maurice Goldhaber's long career in physics was defined by elegant, decisive experiments that answered foundational questions. Escaping Nazi Germany in the 1930s, he brought his keen intellect to Cambridge and later to Brookhaven National Laboratory, which he would eventually direct. With James Chadwick, he performed a crucial experiment proving that the recently discovered neutron was indeed a distinct particle, heavier than the proton, and not a proton-electron composite as some had thought. This was just the beginning. In a legendary experiment with his wife, Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber, he demonstrated that neutrinos—the ghostly particles that stream from nuclear reactions—are inherently left-handed, meaning their spin is always opposite their direction of motion. This profound discovery placed a fundamental constraint on the shape of the weak nuclear force. A thoughtful leader with a gentle manner, Goldhaber spent decades asking the right questions at the frontiers of particle and nuclear physics, leaving a legacy of clarity in a field often shrouded in complexity.