Frederick Reines
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Frederick Reines (March 16, 1918 – August 26, 1998) was an American physicist. He was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for his co-detection of the neutrino with Clyde Cowan in the neutrino experiment, and is considered to be the only scientist in history so intimately associated with the discovery and subsequent investigation of an elementary particle.
Reines was born in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of Jewish emigrants to the US from Russia, and the youngest of four children. Reines and his family moved to upstate New York, where he spent much of his childhood in a small town, relishing 4th of July festivities.
Reines later lived in North Bergen, New Jersey, where he attended Horace Mann Elementary School, and then in Union City, New Jersey, where he attended Union Hill High School. He had a variety of extra-curricular activities, participation in his school’s singing group, and being a member of the History Forum, editor-in-chief of the school yearbook and an Eagle Scout.
Reines had a passion for creating and building things, and exhibited a love of science in his childhood. Speaking to Nobelprize.org in 1995, he recalled, “The first stirrings of interest in science that I remember occurred during a moment of boredom at religious school, when, looking out of the window at twilight through a hand curled to simulate a telescope, I noticed something peculiar about the light; it was the phenomenon of diffraction. That began for me a fascination with light." Ironically, Reines’ excelled in literary and history courses, but received average or low marks in science and math in his freshman year of high school, though he achieved improvement in those areas by his junior and senior years through the encouragement of an unidentified teacher who gave him a key to the school laboratory and gave him permission to work whenever he wanted. This cultivated a love of science in Reines by his senior year, and lead him in the direction of a career in science. In response to a question seniors were asked for a yearbook quote, Reines responded, “To be a physicist extraordinaire.” Reines graduated from high school in 1935.
Reines’ older siblings also encouraged his academic light, and like Reines, were studios pupils who went on to become doctors and lawyers.
Reins attended Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, where he earned his M.E. and M.S. degrees, before receiving his Ph.D. from New York University.
In 1944 Reines began working Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he became a member, and later a leader, of the Theoretical Division at the University of California, Irvine, where he also served as a professor and founding dean of Physical Sciences. There, during the mid-1950’s, he and his colleague, Clyde Cowan, confirmed the existence neutrinos during the mid-1950’s, which since its proposal by Wolfgang Pauli 20 years earlier, had only been theoretical. From then on Reines dedicated the major part of his career to the study of the neutrino’s properties and interactions, which would influence study of the neutrino for future researchers to come, including the discovery of neutrinos emitted from Supernova SN1987A by the Irvine-Michigan-Brookhaven Colloboration, which used Reines’ research to demonstrate the neutrino’s role in the collapse of stars.
Reines became the head of the physics department of Case University from 1959 to 1966.
Reines was honored, along with Martin L. Perl with the Nobel Prize in Physics, and his work with Clyde Cowan was recognized by the National Academy of Sciences. He also received many other awards, including the National Medal of Science.
In 1940 he married Sylvia Samuels and had two children Robert G. and Alisa K. Cowden and had six grandchildren.
Reines remained on UCI's faculty until his death of natural causes in 1998.
An autobiography can be found here
See also
Clyde Cowan (1919-1974) - his partner in discovering the neutrino
External links
- Frederick Reines at Nobel-Winners.com
- Nobel autobiography
- Cowan and Reines Neutrino Experiment
- The detection of the neutrino
Other Reference
- The Union City Reporter; January 15, 2006; ("Native Sons and Daughters: Portrait of UC Nobel laureate Frederick Reines" by Jessica Rosero.)bg:Фредерик Рейнс
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