A cantor’s son in Bad Kissingen
Hans Jakob Steinberger was born on May 25, 1921, in Bad Kissingen, a spa town in Franconia, Bavaria. His father, Ludwig, was one of twelve children of a rural cattle dealer and had served for decades as cantor and religious teacher to the town’s small Jewish community, a post he held until he emigrated in 1938. Ludwig had spent four years in the German Army during the First World War. Jack’s mother, Berta, was born in Nuremberg to a hop merchant; unusually for a woman of her time she had a college education, and she added to the family’s meagre income by teaching English and French to the tourists who came for the spa. Jack grew up with two brothers in what he later called a simple childhood in a Germany living through the post-war depression.
As he entered his teens, the country changed around him. He remembered Nazi election posters showing a hateful caricature of a Jewish face, and torchlight parades of storm troopers singing about Jewish blood flowing from the knife. After the Nazis took power in 1933, new laws shut Jewish children out of higher education in public schools.
Three hundred children
In 1934 American Jewish charities offered to find homes in the United States for 300 German Jewish refugee children. Ludwig Steinberger applied for his two older sons, and at Christmas 1934 Jack, then 13, and his brother Herbert sailed for New York on the SS Washington. Jack was taken in by Barnett Faroll, the owner of a grain brokerage on the Chicago Board of Trade, who raised him as a foster son, paid for his schooling and, crucially, made it possible for Jack’s parents and younger brother to come to America in 1938 and so escape the Holocaust. Steinberger wrote of him with the deepest gratitude for the rest of his life.
He attended New Trier Township High School on Chicago’s wealthy North Shore, a school whose swimming pool, playing fields and excellent teachers offered, as he put it, horizons unimaginable to a young emigrant from a small German town. The reunited family ran a small delicatessen in Chicago that gave them a marginal living. Jack studied chemical engineering at the Armour Institute of Technology until his scholarship ran out, then spent a dispiriting period looking for work before he found a job washing laboratory glassware at a pharmaceutical company for eighteen dollars a week, studying chemistry at the University of Chicago in the evenings. A scholarship let him finish his chemistry degree there in 1942.
Fermi’s student
After Pearl Harbor he joined the Army and was sent to the MIT Radiation Laboratory to work on antennas for radar bomb sights, where for the first time he took real courses in physics. After the war he returned to Chicago on the G.I. Bill and studied under Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller, among a remarkable group of fellow students that included future Nobel laureates Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee. Fermi, whom he called his most influential teacher, steered him away from theory and toward experiment. For his doctoral thesis, completed in 1948, Steinberger measured the energies of electrons emitted when muons from cosmic rays decay, and showed that the muon breaks up into three particles, an electron and probably two neutrinos, rather than two. The result helped lay the foundation for the idea of a universal weak force.
After a frustrating year of theory at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he went to Berkeley’s Radiation Laboratory in 1949, where he showed that neutral pions are produced by photons and decay into pairs of photons. He stayed only a year: he refused to sign the University of California’s anti-communist loyalty oath, and in 1950 he moved to Columbia University.
Bubble chambers and the second neutrino
At Columbia’s Nevis Laboratories Steinberger and his students measured the basic properties of the pion and, from 1954, helped turn the newly invented bubble chamber into a working tool. His group introduced fast recompression, so that chambers could cycle quickly enough to be useful, and used three stereo cameras, an arrangement later adopted for bubble chambers everywhere. With these chambers they discovered the neutral Sigma hyperon and measured many properties of the new strange particles.
In 1961, at the suggestion of his colleague Melvin Schwartz, Steinberger joined Schwartz, Leon Lederman and others in a bold experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory. They used the new Alternating Gradient Synchrotron to make a beam of neutrinos, the ghostly particles that pass through almost everything, and fired it at large spark chambers placed behind a steel wall. The neutrinos produced muons but not electrons, proving that the neutrino born alongside a muon is a different particle from the one born alongside an electron. Published in 1962, the result showed that the basic particles of matter come in matched families, and it established the neutrino beam as a way to probe the weak force at high energies. The 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared by the three men, cited exactly that: the neutrino beam method and the discovery of the muon neutrino.
Thirty years at CERN
In 1968 Steinberger moved to CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, where he would work for the rest of his life. He first studied the subtle asymmetry between matter and antimatter known as CP violation in particles called neutral kaons, using the multiwire chambers just invented by his CERN colleague Georges Charpak, which let his group record far larger samples than before. He later helped design the NA31 experiment, which in the 1980s gave the first evidence of so-called direct CP violation.
In the 1970s he was a founder of the CERN-Dortmund-Heidelberg-Saclay collaboration, which built a 1,200-tonne detector of magnetised iron and fired neutrino beams into it from 1976 to 1984. The experiment used neutrinos to look inside protons and neutrons, much as X-rays reveal a skeleton. It made the first precise measurement of a key parameter of the electroweak theory, gave quantitative support to the quark model, and confirmed predictions of quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the force that binds quarks.
ALEPH and the shape of the Standard Model
When CERN proposed its Large Electron-Positron Collider, LEP, Steinberger led a core group from the neutrino experiment into a much larger venture, the ALEPH detector, and served as its first spokesperson from 1980 to 1990, at the head of some 350 to 400 physicists. CERN colleagues recalled his rigour: he insisted on standard solutions across the detector wherever possible, and on fully understanding every technology before it was used. LEP began running in 1989, and its four detectors, ALEPH among them, produced a dozen years of precise measurements that confirmed the Standard Model of particle physics. One of ALEPH’s first achievements, from the decays of the Z boson, was to show that there are just three families of light neutrinos, and so three families of the basic particles of matter.
What his work gives the world
Steinberger’s discoveries did not produce a gadget. What they produced is knowledge that the whole world now uses: the Standard Model, the best-tested theory in science, which explains how the particles that make up every atom behave and interact. The muon neutrino he helped find was the first sign that matter is organised in families, and the neutrino beam method he helped invent became a standard tool. Today neutrino beams are used in experiments in the United States, Japan and Europe that study how neutrinos change from one type into another, research that bears on why the universe contains matter at all.
His career also helped make CERN what it is: a laboratory where thousands of scientists from dozens of countries, including former enemies, work together in the open and publish everything they find. The detector techniques developed there, and the training of generations of physicists and engineers in large international teams, have spread far beyond particle physics.
A refugee’s life and identity
Steinberger’s story is one of rescue. He owed his education and his family’s survival to a Jewish charity scheme for refugee children and to the generosity of an American foster father, and he said so plainly in his Nobel autobiography. He was not religious: he described himself as an atheist and a humanist, and was named a Humanist Laureate by the International Academy of Humanism. Yet the son of Bad Kissingen’s cantor never lost his tie to the town that expelled him. From the 1980s he visited often; in 2001 his old school was renamed the Jack-Steinberger-Gymnasium, and in 2006 the town made him an honorary citizen. In 2013 he told Bavarian radio that he felt welcome there and felt German again.
He gave his Nobel medal to New Trier High School, the school that had welcomed him as a refugee boy.
Music, mountains and a long old age
Steinberger married twice, first to Joan Beauregard and then to his former student Cynthia Alff, a biologist, and had four children, two from each marriage. His son Ned founded a well-known company making headless guitars and basses; his daughter Julia became an ecological economist at the University of Lausanne. Music filled his home near Geneva, where he organised marathon Bach sessions for amateur and professional musicians that ran from late afternoon until late evening.
He retired from CERN in 1986 and taught part-time at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, but kept working on ALEPH until 1995 and then taught himself cosmology. Into his nineties he still cycled 10 kilometres to CERN, where he advised experiments on CP violation. He died at his home in Geneva on December 12, 2020, aged 99. CERN called him a giant of the field who contributed so much to the experimental development of the Standard Model.
Sources & further reading
Jack Steinberger, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Jack Steinberger (1921–2020), CERN · Jack Steinberger 1921–2020, CERN Courier · Jack Steinberger, Jewish Virtual Library · Jack Steinberger, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.