Frederick Reines

Origins and early life

Frederick Reines was born in Paterson, New Jersey, on 16 March 1918, the youngest of four children of Israel Reines and Gussie Cohen, Jewish emigrants from the same Russian town who met only once they reached New York; he was a great-nephew of Rabbi Yitzchak Yaacov Reines, founder of the religious Zionist movement Mizrachi.

Work and career

The family moved to Hillburn, New York, where his father kept the general store. He sang well enough to consider making a career of it — a coach from the Metropolitan Opera gave him lessons for nothing because the family could not pay — but chose science instead, graduating from the Stevens Institute of Technology and New York University and joining the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in 1944, in Richard Feynman's group.

Wolfgang Pauli had proposed the neutrino in 1930 to save the conservation of energy in beta decay, and thought it undetectable in principle, since it passes through matter almost without touching it. Reines and Clyde Cowan first proposed to catch one beside a nuclear explosion, then settled on a reactor. Their detector looked for a signature nothing else gives: a positron and a neutron appearing together, the neutron caught moments later by cadmium salt dissolved in the liquid.

The 1953 attempt at Hanford drowned in cosmic-ray noise; at the Savannah River reactor, twelve metres underground, they succeeded, and on 14 June 1956 they sent Pauli a telegram to say the neutrino had been found. Reines spent the rest of his career on its properties, including the neutrinos that arrived in 1987 from supernova SN1987A and opened neutrino astronomy. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics and died in Orange, California, on 26 August 1998.