Abstract
I draw on my interviews in 2005–2007 with Gerson Goldhaber (1924–2010), his wife Judith, and his colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. I discuss his childhood, early education, marriage to his first wife Sulamith (1923–1965), and his further education at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1942–1947) and his doctoral research at University of Wisconsin at Madison (1947–1950). He then was appointed to an instructorship in physics at Columbia University (1950–1953) before accepting a position in the physics department at the University of California at Berkeley and the Radiation Laboratory (later the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, today the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), where he remained for the rest of his life. He made fundamental contributions to physics, including to the discovery of the antiproton in 1955, the GGLP effect in 1960, the psi particle in 1974, and charmed mesons in 1977, and to cosmology, including the discovery of the accelerating universe and dark energy in 1998. Beginning in the late 1960s, he also took up art, and he and his second wife Judith, whom he married in 1969, later collaborated in illustrating and writing two popular books. Goldhaber died in Berkeley, California, on July 19, 2010, at the age of 86.
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Notes
Interview 6, page 170; I use this notation throughout. I have deposited my interviews with Gerson Goldhaber, his wife Judith Goldhaber, and his colleagues in the Niels Bohr Library and Archives, American Institute of Physics Center for History of Physics, College Park, Maryland.
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Acknowledgment
I thank Roger H. Stuewer for his careful and thoughtful editorial work on my paper.
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Ursula Pavlish lives in Pécs, Hungary. She graduated with a degree in physics from Princeton University in 2005 and then studied history of science at Harvard University for one year. She has conducted interviews with more than twenty-five physicists and astronomers.
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Pavlish, U. Gerson Goldhaber: A Life in Science. Phys. Perspect. 13, 189–214 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-010-0040-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-010-0040-7
Keywords
- Gerson Goldhaber
- Maurice Goldhaber
- Sulamith Goldhaber
- Judith Goldhaber
- Ernst Alexander
- Luis Alvarez
- Robert P. Kirshner
- Martin L. Perl
- Saul Perlmutter
- Hugh T. Richards
- Burton Richter
- Emilio Segrè
- Samuel C.C. Ting
- George H. Trilling
- Hebrew University
- University of Wisconsin
- Columbia University
- University of California at Berkeley
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- Bevatron
- Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
- nuclear physics
- gamma-ray spectroscopy
- nuclear emulsions
- particle physics
- bubble chambers
- mesons
- muons
- pions
- antiproton
- GGLP effect
- psi particle
- cosmology
- Supernova Cosmology Project
- High-z Supernova Search Team
- accelerating universe
- dark energy
- history of physics
- history of cosmology