Gerson Goldhaber

Biography Goldhaber was born on February 20, 1924, in Germany. His Jewish family fled Nazi Germany to Egypt and Goldhaber earned a master's degree in physics in 1947 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Goldhaber was awarded his Ph.D. in 1950 from the University of Wisconsin and became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1953 while he was on the faculty of Columbia University.

Goldhaber became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and did additional work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. At Berkeley, Goldhaber was part of a particle physics research team that used photographic emulsion to track the movements of subatomic particles in proton-proton scattering experiments that led to the identification of the antiproton, a discovery that earned Owen Chamberlain and Emilio G. Segrè the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1959.

From 1960 to 1961 Goldhaber was a Ford Foundation fellow at CERN, A particle he discovered in 1963 was given the name A meson, named after his son Amos.

A resident of Berkeley, California, Goldhaber died at his home there at age 86 on July 19, 2010. He was survived by his second wife, science writer Judith Margoshes, as well as two daughters, a son and three grandchildren. During their 41-year marriage, he collaborated with Judith on two books of sonnets, which were illustrated with watercolors he had painted. His marriage to nuclear chemist Sulamith Goldhaber ended with her death from a brain tumor in 1965 while the couple was traveling in India. Goldhaber's brother Maurice was a particle physicist who served as director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, one of many physicists in Goldhaber's family. 1982 – Elected as a foreign member of the Swedish Royal Academy 1977 – California Scientist of the Year award, for his work on charmed mesons 1976–77 – Morris Loeb Lecturer in Physics, Harvard University 1977 – Elected member of the National Academy of Sciences 1972–73 – Guggenheim Fellow at CERN 1958–59, 1975–76, 1984–85 – Miller Professor at the University of California Berkeley.