Gertrude Goldhaber, German-American Physicist

Goldhaber in 1979 at the History of Physics Symposium at the University of Minnesota. Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber (July 14, 1911 - February 2, 1998) was a German-born Jewish-American nuclear physicist. She earned her PhD. from the University of Munich, and though her family suffered during The Holocaust, Gertrude was able to escape to London. In 1939 she married Maurice Goldhaber and moved to Illinois to join him at the University of Illinois. The state of Illinois had strict anti-nepotism laws at the time which prevented her from being hired by the university because her husband already had a position there. She was granted neither salary nor laboratory space, and worked in Maurice's lab as an unpaid assistant. She studied neutron-proton and neutron-nucleus reaction cross sections in 1941, and gamma radiation emission and absorption by nuclei in 1942. She also observed that spontaneous nuclear fission is accompanied by the release of neutrons, a result that had be theorized earlier but had yet to be shown. Her work with spontaneous nuclear fission was classified during the war, and was only published after the war ended in 1946 She and her husband, Maurice Goldhaber, spent most of their post-war careers at Brookhaven National Laboratory. She died in 1998 at the age of 86

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Enhancement Escaped Fission German American German Born German-american German-born Gertrude Holocaust Jewish-american Minnesota Neutron Nucleus Proton Researcher Spontaneous

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