Maurice Goldhaber

Physicist, born in Lemberg, Austria. As a fellow at Cambridge University, he discovered the nuclear photodisintegration effect with colleague James Chadwick (1934). He went to the USA to join the University of Illinois (1938–50), where he and his wife, Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber, demonstrated the identity of beta rays with electrons. At Brookhaven National Laboratory, he continued to make major contributions to studies of elementary particles.

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 is heavier enough than the proton to decay. In the 1940's with his wife Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber he established that that beta particles are identical with electrons. With Edward Teller he proposed that the so-called "giant-dipole nuclear resonance" was due to the neutrons in a nucleus vibrating as a group against the protons as a group (Goldhaber-Teller model). when he lost the bet, he speculated that the reason anti-matter does not appear to be abundant in the universe is that before the Big Bang, a single particle, the "universon" existed that then decayed into "cosmon" and "anti-cosmon," and that the cosmon subsequently decayed to produce the known cosmos. In the 1950's also he speculated that all fermions such as electrons, protons and neutrons are "doubled," that is that each is associated with a similar heavier particle. He aso speculated that in what became known as the Goldhaber-Christie model, the so-called strange particles were composites of just 3 basic particles.