April 18 is reserved to Maurice Goldhaber

April 18 is reserved to Maurice Goldhaber
Today is the birthday of award-winning nuclear and particle physicist Maurice Goldhaber, who was born in 1911 in Austria. He made one of his first major contributions while at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory: Working in collaboration with James Chadwick, Goldhaber proposed using photodisintegration to split the nucleus of the newly discovered deuterium atom into a proton and a neutron in order to measure the neutron’s mass.

In the 1950s at Brookhaven National Laboratory, he and colleagues conducted a revolutionary tabletop experiment that demonstrated that the neutrino spins in only one direction and therefore violates the principle of mirror symmetry. Goldhaber was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1983, the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1991, and the Enrico Fermi Award in 1998. He died at age 100 in 2011.

Source and further reading:
http://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.031448/full/

#history #mauricegoldhaber #physics #science