Jack Steinberger was born on May 25, 1921, in Bad Kissingen, Germany. He and his brother left Germany in 1934 and immigrated to Chicago, Illinois. There, they lived with the family of Barnard Faroll, a grain broker. Later, Faroll was instrumental in bringing the rest of Steinberger's family to the United States.

Steinberger studied chemical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology, but left to enlist in the U.S. Army following the attack on Pearl Harbor. The army sent him to the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he made radar bomb sights and studied physics. After the war, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, earning a B.S. e in 1942, and a Ph.D. in physics in 1948. During his doctoral studies at Chicago, Steinberger had studied muons (semi-stable electrical particles) and showed that, when they decay, they yield two neutrons (nuclear particles with the mass...