Gerson Goldhaber was born in Chemnitz,
Germany, Feb. 20, 1924. With the rise of nazism, the family left Germany in 1933.
He, an older brother, and their parents went to Cairo, Egypt where Gerson attended
an English high school. In 1942 he began to study physics at the Hebrew University
in Jerusalem that led to a M.Sc. degree in 1947. His thesis research, under Ernst
Alexander, was a crystallographic study with X-rays.
In Jerusalem Gerson met his first wife, Sulamith Löw,
then a chemistry student. They were married in 1947, the year
in which she also earned her M.Sc. degree, and when they were
both admitted to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin
Sula pursued nuclear chemistry, and Gerson physics. At UW
Gerson made his first upward move in energy from KeV X-rays
to MeV protons. There he studied nuclear resonances in elements
excited by protons accelerated in an electrostatic generator
that had been developed by Ray Herb. For a Ph. D. thesis Gerson
devised an innovative method of measuring gamma-ray spectra
from observation of proton recoils produced by deuteron photodisintegration
in D2O loaded photographic emulsions.
Upon attaining the degree in 1950 he took up a position as
Instructor at Columbia University. At Columbia's Nevis Lab.
Gerson took his next step up in energy, and into particle
physics, working at its newly commissioned 340 MeV cyclotron.
Here, after a foray with David Bodansky into development of
scintillation counters to measure pulse-height spectra, he
returned to his loaded-emulsion technique to study pion interactions
with protons and deuterons. Sula and their young son Amos
Nathaniel joined Gerson at Nevis. She, having morphed from
chemist to physicist, joined Gerson in a very successful career
of joint experimental work that continued productively until
her sudden death in 1965.
Perhaps the most ambitious, certainly the cleverest, application of the loaded
emulsion technique was a search for evidence of what later became famous as the
33 pion-nucleon resonance. To observe pions of appropriate energy, which sorry
to say could not escape the cyclotron’s magnetic field, Gerson and Leon
Lederman, in a technological tour de force, exposed the loaded emulsions inside
the cyclotron vacuum tank. Alas, the chosen pion energies being just below and
just above the resonance energy they missed an important discovery.
Then, in 1953, Gerson made his last move, joining the Physics
faculty at the University of California at Berkeley and the
research staff at its Radiation Laboratory (now the Lawrence
Berkeley National Lab., LBNL). Here he moved up further in
energy to the soon to be commissioned 6 BeV (now GeV) Bevatron
proton synchrotron. He and Sula, together with other Rad Lab
people at times, vigorously attacked the outstanding questions
in particle physics, again with emulsion detectors. Their
research included determination of many properties - masses,
lifetimes, decay schemes - of the "strange" K-mesons
and hyperons. These results contributed to the tau-theta puzzle
that finally was solved by T. D. Lee and C. N. Yang whose
analysis led to the shocking discovery that parity is not
conserved in weak interactions. Then, following the observation
by Chamberlain, Segre, Ypsilantis, and Wiegand of putative
antiprotons, Gerson and Gosta Ekspong nailed their identity
in annihilations on nuclei in emulsions exposed to a beam
of those particles. Gerson spent much of the next few years
studying and elucidating details of the annihilation process.
The emulsion gave way to the bubble chamber as the principal
device with which to study elementary particle properties
and interactions. During somewhat more than a decade, Gerson
and collaborators found Bose-Einstein correlations in multi-pion
states, showed the striking differences in K+
and K-.behavior, determined the
spin of the K* resonance, discovered the A and the anti-Omega-,
studied the Q-meson and made other studies of pion and K+
interactions.
In 1969 Gerson married Judith Margoshes Golwyn, a science
writer, playwright, and poet. They are parents of two daughters,
Michaela and Shaya.
In the next two decades the LBL/SLAC collaboration built and operated an electronic
detector, a triggered tracking, time-of-flight and calorimetric device with which
he and colleagues studied products of electron-positron annihilations made in
the SPEAR storage ring at Stanford University. They produced many astonishing
results, chief, perhaps, among them the discovery of bound and bare Charm quarks
dressed into Psions and D-Mesons, that provided crucial support to validate the
current quantum-chromodynamics strong-interaction paradigm. Later, the group
measured the mass and width of the Z0 boson with the
enhanced MkII detector at the new SLC collider at SLAC.
Then Gerson made a remarkable shift in research from particle
to cosmic physics. Since 1989 Gerson has been associated with
the Supernova Cosmology Project at LBNL, studying properties
of very distant supernovae, those with redshift parameter
up to z ~1. Since, as they have shown, these type Ia supernovae
can be calibrated as "standard candles", their observed properties
can provide information about the cosmological deceleration
of the expanding universe. The extremely surprising result
was that, contrary to all expectations, the universe’s
expansion in fact is accelerating. This seems to imply that
a mysterious dark energy with repulsive gravity permeates
all space. With these results the SCP people have presented
scientists with the outstanding challenge to come to an understanding
of the nature of this most peculiar energy.
Among the honors awarded Gerson Goldhaber are:
Ford Foundation Fellowships, 1960-61 and 1966
Guggenheim Fellowship, 1972
Loeb Lecturer, Harvard University, 1976
California Scientist of the Year, 1977
Doctorate of Philosophy honoris causa, University of Stockholm, 1986
Panofsky Prize of the American Physical Society, 1991 (co-recipient
with Francois Pierre)
Gerson Goldhaber is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, an elected Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish
Academy of Science, and an elected member of the U. S. National Academy of Science