A test at Brookhaven accelerator – the largest in the world at the time – was typically completed in a matter of hours. The neutrino test took 800 hours over eight months, a measure of how important it was to the project. A year after its completion, the European Council for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, confirmed the results.
Hans Jakob Steinberger was born on May 25, 1921, in Bad Kissingen in Bavaria, Germany, one of the three sons of Ludwig and Berta Steinberger. His father was a singer and religious teacher of the city’s small Jewish community; His mother with a college education contributed to the family income by taking English and French lessons.
With the rise of the Nazis and the enactment of laws that barred Jewish children from attending public schools and from seeking higher education, his parents arranged for him and his older brother to go to the United States. with the help of the American Jewish charities, which had offered to find homes for 300 German refugee children.
Soon, Dr. Steinberger in a biographical sketch for the Nobel Foundation, “we were on the SS Washington, heading for New York, Christmas 1934.”
The brothers were placed in separate but nearby nursing homes in the Chicago area. Jack settled into the home of a wealthy grain broker named Barnett Faroll, who several years later arranged for parents and a younger brother to be with them in Chicago, freeing them from the Holocaust, Dr. wrote. Steinberger.
The family soon began working on a small delicatessen in Chicago.
After graduating from New Trier City High School in the suburbs of Winnetka, Ill., Dr. Steinberger won a scholarship to the Weapons Institute of Technology (now the Illinois Institute of Technology), where he studied chemical engineering.
The scholarship ended after two years, and he found a job washing bottles at a chemical lab for $ 18 a week. He studied chemistry at the University of Chicago in the afternoon and worked at the family store on weekends. The university later awarded him a scholarship which allowed him to retire from his day job. He graduated in 1942 with a bachelor’s degree in physics.