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Memorial Keepers(3)
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Jack Steinberger
May 25th, 1921 - December 12th, 2020
May 25th, 1921 - December 12th, 2020
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Tributes
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Sau Lan Wu
From left to right: Jacques Lefrançois, Sau Lan Wu, Jack Steinberger and Lorenzo Foà.
Vera Luth
Jack Steinberger - My thesis advisor at CERN 1969 -1973 Photo of Jack attending my requirement party at SLAC in 2012 The four years I spent at CERN as a member of the small CERN-Heidelberg group building a beyond the state-of-the- art detector and producing high precision measurements of K0 decays under Jack’s leadership were extremely important for my later career in experimental particle physics. Observing and interacting with Jack was a great experience in the early years, as well as during occasional visits to CERN in later years. He stood out as an outstanding scientist and mentor with a very broad spectrum of knowledge and interests!
Roger Nordmann
Je garde un souvenir lumineux de Jack, qui m'avait stimulé et challengé sur l'énergie solaire. Un destin incroyable, sa vie.
Sau Lan Wu
In the foreground from the left, Jacques Lefrançois, Jack Steinberger, Lorenzo Foà and Pierre Lazeyras, in front of the ALEPH detector. ALEPH was an experiment on the LEP accelerator, which studied high-energy collisions between electrons and positrons from 1989 to 2000.
Lisa Steinberger
Happy 100th Birthday, Uncle Jack! I wish you were here to celebrate with us--but who would wish six more months of suffering on you just for that? Thank you for giving our family and our world your very best for 99 years! I must admit that when I first met you as an adult in 2004, I wasn't expecting much. The Steinberger family has never been especially close. Decades with an ocean in between doesn't help much. The last time I remembered you visiting our home, in 1970, I was six years old. The few stories I had heard since were not always flattering. And I suspected that winning a Nobel Prize in the meantime would simply make an arrogant man insufferable. Wow--was I ever surprised! And so very glad to be wrong! You were so kind, generous, and welcoming! If you harbored any arrogance at all, it was very well hidden. You welcomed me for a visit and wished it had been longer. You introduced me to your friends in your home town of Bad Kissingen, Germany--and they are now my friends too. You were truly glad to see me and to be yourself with me, over many visits since. I rather get the impression that winning the Nobel Prize actually humbled you and helped you to recognize what's really important in life. You tried to use your fame to help make the world a better place. You delighted in making a difference. You seemed to value family more than you ever had before. You appreciated, perhaps more than anything, being loved not for your achievements, but for yourself. I will miss sharing that love with you. I will miss our regular, if infrequent, visits. I will miss your wry smile. I will miss making chocolate Maikäfer for your birthday and presenting them to you, as you ask with a twinkle and a smirk, if there is one for every year of your age. (Always. And you're the only one I know who can limit themselves to only one a day--which makes your quota last over three months!) I will miss your twitting me by calling me "Niece Lisa," because I can never stop calling you "Uncle Jack." I will miss sitting across the kitchen table from you in your home in Geneva, as we share that love in silence. (And marveling at how many habits and mannerisms you share with your younger brother Rudi, my father!) I will miss calling you and hearing you ask, "When are you coming to visit?" Most of all, I will just miss you. Thank you for sharing yourself with me and with the world over 99 amazing years, Uncle Jack! With love and gratitude always, "Niece Lisa."
Harry Nelson
I really got to know Jack in the winter of 1988-9, when CERN was shut down for the holiday, with heat off. I was able to keep working on a new MicroVAX workstation in my office, on the second floor of Building 2. It was dark and cold. Exactly one person paced in the hallway. I guess he’d just returned from Stockholm. In an old sweater, Jack stopped in my doorway and asked, “Professor, can I invite you for a coffee?”. I could fill a book with Jack’s stories and discussions. Mark Twain wrote: “Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.” Jack often described the mistakes that he, and titans he worked with, had made; he was eerie in his ability to get to the heart of experimental particle physics issues. We younger scientists thus felt that our mistakes weren’t devastations, and that with persistence, taste for elegance in experimental design, focus on the jugular, we, too, might become great. I’ve done my best to pass the gifts that Jack gave me to younger scientists. Elsewhere on our hallway there came to be a room full of scientists from China, who came to CERN to work with Jack. I remember discussing with Jack how an involved discussion among those scientists in Chinese sounded remarkably musical. One day he invited me for a coffee with them, and in the end, I married Audrey (Changqing Qiao). A picture of our visit to CERN in 2016 with our daughter Emma is shared. Out in the hereafter, I guess Jack has an office on a very important hallway. I’ll imagine him pacing it, and stopping in the doorway of the Boss (whoever that is!) and stopping to ask, “Professor, can I invite you for a coffee?”.
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