Distinguished Physicists Manifest Lifelong Commitment To Succeed

UPTON, N.Y.--Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber has pulled out a few faded, blue three-ring binders, several books, and other reprints. It's a two-foot pile of paper that provides tangible evidence of her half-century of work as a physicist. The documentation is unnecessary. The fact that she belongs to the National Academy of Sciences seems proof enough that her work is important. But Scharff-Goldhaber persists. As one-half of a marriage that began during an era when women scientists were consistently underrecognized for their role in research, she wants to make sure that her professional achievements are acknowledged. There's a soft but insistent determination about her as the 79-year-old Scharff-Goldhaber tells her story. It may be the same determination that was needed to push through a succession of professional barriers. As a young student in Germany in the last days of the Weimer Republic, she was one of few women attending Berlin University. It was there that she met her future husband, Maurice Goldhaber. At the time, however, they were just casual friends. She moved to Munich to do graduate work on ferromagnetism. She was already walking on shaky ground for rejecting the accepted career for women interested in science, that of a teacher, and for having the chutzpah to want to be a scientist. But Hitler's rise to power made life increasingly uncomfortable for Scharff, a Jew. Many of her peers had already fled to universities here in Europe, but she stayed to do her research. "I should have left earlier," she recalls. "But since I had started my thesis, I felt I should finish." In 1935 she received her doctorate. But she didn't know where to go next. "I wrote to 35 refugee scientists. They all wrote back and said, `Don't come here. There are already too many refugees,' " she recalls. All except one. Goldhaber, himself a promising young physicist in London, thought something might turn up. So she went to Imperial College in London and did postdoctoral work with G.P. Thomson on a camera that used electron diffraction to study surfaces. The Austrian-born Goldhaber had left Berlin in 1933 and was working at the famed Cavendish Laboratory in England. His idea to use heavy hydrogen to determine the mass of a neutron had impressed James Chadwick, who took Goldhaber into his lab, where Goldhaber finished his doctorate. But it proved to be only a temporary home. After Chadwick died, recalls Goldhaber, "it became clear that nuclear physics was going to be a minor part of the lab." He visited the United States and accepted a job offer from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1938. Meanwhile, life in England was dismal for Scharff. She recalls having to sell her Leica camera and translate German abstracts into English to make ends meet. Her parents, still in Germany, were not able to send money to bolster her meager earnings, and no British laboratory seemed interested in hiring a woman refugee scientist. She was able to visit the U.S., however. During her tour, she stopped to see Goldhaber at Illinois. "I thought it was a terrible place," she remembers. "It was very hot." But Goldhaber wasn't put off by her reaction to his new home. Soon after she returned to England, he wrote and suggested that she join him in the U.S. as his wife. She consented, hoping for a happy marriage and better prospects for her research. They were married in London in 1939, and it didn't take them long to start a family. A son, Alfred, was born their first year at Illinois, and a second, Michael, arrived two years later. Both children would eventually earn Ph.D.'s in physics. Alfred Goldhaber is a professor of physics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, while his younger brother writes a newsletter about the social aspects of science. For 10 years Scharff-Goldhaber labored in a lab near her husband's, as an unpaid faculty member, while he moved up the academic ranks as a salaried professor. It was only when Brookhaven National Laboratory promised them both jobs--part of an attempt to entice them to the newly created federal nuclear laboratory on Long Island--that Illinois broke its so-called anti-nepotism tradition and made her a professor. Even so, in 1950 the Goldhabers headed east to Upton, N.Y. They have been there ever since, pioneers of modern nuclear science and technology. Scharff-Goldhaber has always been a few steps behind her husband scientifically, but, they agree, never in his shadow. He was elected to the academy in 1958, and she joined him in 1972. At the time she was only the 11th woman, and the second woman physicist, to earn that honor. Her work progressed more slowly, she says, in part because of her duties as a mother and the fact that, for so long, she did not have a real position. It also didn't help that, to stay in research, she had to shift from materials science to nuclear physics. The Goldhabers worked together often in those early days at Brookhaven. It was a fruitful collaboration. Over lunch one day, for example, they came up with a way to resolve a long-standing question of whether beta rays and electrons were one and the same. By late that afternoon they had preliminary results. "It was a very simple experiment. The idea was the main thing," says Goldhaber, who counts that day's work as one of their greatest achievements in science. But eventually this husband-and-wife lab team dissolved. "After some time, though, I thought it was too intense, so I branched out," says Goldhaber, who still goes to the lab every day. They continued to discuss science, however, and, once Goldhaber was named director of the lab in 1961, how the lab should be run. As he bathed in the limelight, guiding Brookhaven through a 12-year period of growth and scientific progress, Scharff-Goldhaber stood backstage, cueing him with her ideas. She continued to promote science in her own quiet way. Although she says she loved her job at Brookhaven, she had always been unhappy that the former director exerted such tight control over the lives of the scientists there. "I had many ideas on how to improve the lab," she recalls. Together, they worked to create an advisory council of staff scientists to help plot the lab's future. They also set up visiting committees so that outsiders could evaluate the lab's progress. In the wake of Sputnik and the national concern about the state of U.S. science education, she organized a physical sciences training course for high school teachers that, 32 years later, is still being supported by Brookhaven. Another time she wanted to start a lecture series. "I was immediately told that it would never work," she recalls. Thirty years later, the series is flourishing. The r‚sum‚s of both scientists are filled with honors bestowed for their contributions to their science and their community. She has served on the advisory board of the Energy Department's Fermilab, and on numerous Academy and American Physical Society (APS) committees. She also has been active on other national, local, and professional society committees. And she was recently recognized for her lifelong work by the Metropolitan Chapter of the Association For Women in Science. He was APS president in 1982, the same year he won the government's J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize for his contributions to theoretical elementary particle physics. Together, they have been honored by Boston University, which offers a Gertrude and Maurice Goldhaber Prize to outstanding new graduate students in physics. But even after 50 years of collaborative science, the mantle of achievement rests more easily on his shoulders than on hers. When Goldhaber sits down for an interview, the last thing he feels he needs to qualify is his science knowledge. He takes for granted that his reputation as an outstanding researcher is well established. Scharff-Goldhaber, on the other hand, still needs her scrapbooks. --E.P.

Distinguished Physicists Manifest Lifelong Commitment To Succeed

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