Goldhaber was born on February 20, 1924, in Germany. His Jewish family fled Nazi Germany to Egypt and Goldhaber earned a master's degree in physics in 1947 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Goldhaber was awarded his Ph.D. in 1950 from the University of Wisconsin and became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1953 while he was on the faculty of Columbia University.[6]
From 1960-61 Goldhaber was a Ford Foundation fellow at CERN,[5] Geneva. During this period he co-authored with his wife and B. Peters a CERN report.[7] A particle he discovered in 1963 was given the name A meson, named after his son Amos.[6]
He later became involved with Rich Muller, Carl Pennypacker and Saul Perlmutter, of the Supernova Cosmology Project. The project, founded in 1988 at Lawrence Berkeley, searched the Universe for signs of supernovae, which could be used to determine the rate at which the Universe was expanding. By 1997, data that the group had gathered provided evidence that the rate of the expansion of the Universe was increasing due to what they termed dark energy, contrary to the prevailing theory that expansion would slow down and ultimately reverse itself with a Big Crunch as the ultimate fate of the universe.[6]
A resident of Berkeley, California, Goldhaber died at his home there at age 86 on July 19, 2010. He was survived by his second wife, science writer Judith Margoshes, as well as two daughters, a son and three grandchildren. During their 41-year marriage, he collaborated with Judith on two books of sonnets, which were illustrated with watercolors he had painted. His marriage to nuclear chemist Sulamith Goldhaber ended with her death from a brain tumor in 1965 while the couple was traveling in India. Goldhaber's brother Maurice was a particle physicist who served as director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, one of many physicists in Goldhaber's family.[6]