Alfred Scharff Goldhaber

Alfred Scharff Goldhaber is a professor in the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University.

He represents the second of three physics generations in his family. Collaboration with his parents led to what may have been the first mother-son publications in physics. Among his research publications are articles on magnetic monopoles, elementary particles, nuclei, condensed matter, and, recently, cosmology. Themes that help to bind these topics together include the principle of gauge invariance, the use of classical limits and the correspondence principle, and the study of long-distance, low-energy constraints on objects that may have quite high-energy internal structure. He is co-author of a number of review articles, including “Terrestrial and Extraterrestrial Limits on the Photon Mass,” “Hypothetical Particles,” and “High-Energy Collisions of Nuclei,” as well as an annotated bibliography, “Magnetic Monopoles” and the more recent, “Photon and Graviton Mass Limits”. He enjoys hindsight heuristics, asking why people made discoveries later than they might have; understanding this better could aid future discoveries.  He and Robert P. Crease of the Stony Brook Philosophy Department are co-authors of the just-released book, The Quantum Moment – focusing on the cultural impact of concepts from quantum mechanics.