Marvin L. Goldberger Papers, 1945 - 2012 (MSS 793)

Marvin Leonard "Murph" Goldberger was born in Chicago, Illinois on October 22, 1922. He attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh (now Carnegie-Mellon University) where he received his bachelor's degree in 1943. For the next three years he served in the U.S. Army while attending graduate school, primarily in the theoretical physics division of the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, where he worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Goldberger was closely associated with Nobel Laureate Eugene P. Wigner and was a member of the Wigner's team of scientists who did the principal work for the great atomic (Production Reactor) Pile Design at DuPont and Hanford in Washington.

While at the University of Chicago, Goldberger met his future wife, Mildred Ginsberg, also a mathematician and physicist working on the Manhattan Project. Goldberger received his PhD in physics in 1948 under the mentorship of another Nobel Laureate, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.

Goldberger joined the faculty at the University of Chicago and taught physics from 1950 through 1957. He eventually left to teach physics at Princeton University from 1957 to 1977. In 1978 he was appointed President of Caltech, where he served for the next decade. He later returned to Princeton to serve as the director of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1987 to 1991.

Goldberger joined the University of California system in 1991, first as a professor of physics at UCLA then joining UC San Diego in 1993 as a professor of physics, as Dean of the university's Division of Natural Sciences until 1999, then as professor emeritus until his death in 2014.

In addition to his long and illustrious teaching career, Goldberger was a co-founder of JASON, an elite group of scientists who worked for the Department of Defense and other agencies of government concerned with nuclear arms control efforts. He served as the chairman of JASON from 1960 through 1966.

Goldberger also served as an adviser to various presidents. During the late 1960s he was chairman of the Strategic Military Committee of the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC). He served as a member of the United States-People's Republic of China Joint Commission on Scientific and Technological Cooperation and was the chairman of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on International Security and Arms Control. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was chairman of the Federation of American Scientists.

Goldberger passed away on November 26, 2014.

Marvin L. Goldberger Papers (10090-MS). California Institute of Technology.

The CalTech papers include personal and general correspondence, documents relating to the administration of Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), papers concerning professional societies, government and civic affairs, arms control, human rights, and a small amount of biographical material.