(Image: CERN)
Jack Steinberger, a giant of the field who contributed so much to the experimental development of the Standard Model, passed away on 12 December 2020 aged 99. Born in the Bavarian town of Bad Kissingen in 1921, he left Germany at the age of 13 to escape rising antisemitism and settled in the United States. After receiving a degree in chemistry from the University of Chicago, he turned his attention to physics, working at the MIT radiation laboratory through the war years before returning to Chicago to embark on a career in theoretical physics. Under the guidance of Enrico Fermi, however, he switched to the experimental side of the field, conducting mountaintop investigations into cosmic rays. This marked the beginning of his interest in neutrino physics, which would be rewarded with the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with Melvin Schwartz and Leon Lederman, for their 1962 discovery of the muon neutrino at Brookhaven National Laboratory.