Maurice Goldhaber (born 18.05.1911) is an American physicist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1958). He was born in Lvov. In 1930-33 he studied at the University of Berlin and graduated from the University of Cambridge (1936), where he worked in 1936-38. In 1938—50 he was professor at the University of Illinois, and from 1950 he has been at Brookhaven National Laboratory (director in 1961—73). His work is in atomic and nuclear physics, neutron physics, the physics of elementary particles and cosmology. Together with J. Chadwick he discovered the nuclear photoeffect in 1934 and predicted (1935) the beta decay of the free neutron, and carried out (1934 — 36) the splitting by slow neutrons of the nuclei of a number of light elements (lithium, boron, nitrogen). The reactions he discovered, in particular Li6 + n -> He4 + H3 (1934-35) and N14 + n -> C14 + p (1936), were of great importance as a source of radioactive tritium H3 and carbon C14 respectively. In 1937 he carried out the first systematic studies of the scattering of slow neutrons by nuclei and obtained the value of their cross-section (which was used in the first nuclear reactors). In 1940 he showed that beryllium can be used as a moderator of neutrons. In 1948, with E. Teller, he predicted resonance scattering by the nucleus (the giant resonance) and in 1950 he observed it. He measured (1958) the helicity of the neutrino (the Goldhaber experiment). He carried out an experiment to test the law of conservation of electric charge and established that the half-life for the process e- -> ν + γ exceeds 1019 years. In 1956 he developed a scheme for classifying elementary particles based on three particles — the proton, the neutron and the negative kaon (the Goldhaber model). He put forward a hypothesis about the Universe at an early stage of its evolution. For his research on electromagnetic and weak interactions in nuclei he was awarded the T. Bonner Prize in 1971.