Nobel laureate in physics, dies at 99
Groundbreaking experiments with neutrinos
Jack Steinberger, a German-born physicist who fled to the United States as a boy to escape the Nazis and went on to win the Nobel Prize for his work with neutrinos, one of the most elusive and mysterious of all the elementary constituents of matter, died on Dec. 12 in Geneva at 99.
Family members confirmed his death but did not provide an immediate cause.
An American citizen whose prize-winning work had been conducted at Columbia University in New York and the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, Dr. Steinberger had spent the latter part of his life at the CERN nuclear research centre in Switzerland.
Over a long and productive life, Steinberger experienced and embodied some of the main currents of the history of his times. The rise of the Nazis sent him to America before the Second World War. But as part of the postwar effort of his native Germany at reconciliation, he saw the school he had attended there named in his honour.
After being rescued from Europe through human generosity and taken in by an American foster family, he demonstrated generosity in his turn, donating his Nobel medal to the public high school he attended as a refugee in a suburb of Chicago.
In his professional life, he rose from a humble background, served in the U. S. army during the war, and reached the highest levels of physics, making an important contribution to the effort to understand the particles and forces that characterize matter and the universe.
He and two others, Leon Lederman and Melvin Schwartz, shared the 1988 Nobel in physics for their technique for producing high-energy beams of neutrinos and for showing the existence of two types of neutrino. Their experiments, conducted in 1962, were regarded as milestones in particle physics.
Hans Jakob Steinberger was born May 25, 1921, in the Bavarian town of Bad Kissingen. In addition to the Nobel, his honours include the U.S. National Medal of Science.
His first marriage, to Joan Beauregard, ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife, Cynthia Alff; two sons from his first marriage; and two children from his second marriage.