Thursday, June 02, 2011

The passing of Maurice Goldhaber...



From the LA Times...

Maurice Goldhaber, one of the pioneers of modern physics whose experiments helped create the current understanding of how the world works, died May 11 at his home on Long Island, N.Y., after a short illness. He had celebrated his 100th birthday less than a month earlier.

Goldhaber was "one of the world's most distinguished nuclear and particle physicists," the U.S. government said in 1998 when it presented him the prestigious Enrico Fermi Award. His innovative and thought-provoking experiments provided much of the foundation for the standard model of physics that now paints our view of the universe, and his leadership and vision as head of the Brookhaven National Laboratory during the 1960s led to three Nobel Prizes in Physics for the Long Island institution.