Everything about Frederick Reines totally explained
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 may be the only scientist in history "so intimately associated with the discovery of an
elementary particle and the subsequent thorough investigation of its fundamental properties".
Early life
Reines was born in
Paterson, New Jersey, the son of
Jewish emigrants to the US from Russia and a paternal relative of the
Rabbi Yitzchak Yaacov Reines, as 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 where his father ran a country store. Looking back, Reines said: "My early childhood memories center around this typical American country store and life in a small American town, including
4th of July celebrations marked by fireworks and patriotic music played from a pavilion bandstand."
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 extracurricular 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. This discovery helped to inaugurate the field of
neutrino astronomy.
On the basis of his work in first detecting the
neutrino, Reines became the head of the physics department of
Case Western Reserve University from
1959 to
1966. At Case, Reines led a group that was the first to detect neutrinos created in the atmosphere by
cosmic rays. Reines had a booming voice, and had been a singer since childhood. During this time, besides performing his duties as a research supervisor and chairman of the physics department, Reines sang in the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus under the direction of
Robert Shaw in performances with
George Szell and the
Cleveland Orchestra.
In 1966, Reines took most of his neutrino research team with him when he left for California to become the founding dean of physical sciences at the then new
University of California, Irvine (UCI). While at UCI, Reines extended the research interests of some of his graduate students into the development of medical radiation detectors, such as for measuring total radiation delivered to the whole human body in
radiation therapy.
Reines had prepared for the possibility of measuring the distant events of a supernova explosion. Supernova explosions are rare, but Reines thought he might be lucky, see one in his lifetime, and be able to catch the neutrinos streaming from it in his specially-designed detectors. According to a UCI obituary, during his wait for a supernova to explode, he put signs on some of his large neutrino detectors, calling them "Supernova Early Warning Systems".
After Supernova 1987A exploded, researchers used the results of Reines's and others' measurements to figure out events in
stellar evolution. According to these research findings, when a
supermassive star collapses and then explodes, the resulting jets of neutrinos bombard the escaping masses to create the elements up through
uranium that are heavier than iron. Researchers have concluded that without these natural neutrino processes in exploding supermassive stars, the
elements like
copper,
silver,
platinum, and
gold that are heavier than
iron wouldn't exist; at least no other natural process has been discovered that creates usable quantities of the elements heavier than iron.
In 1995, Reines was honored, along with
Martin L. Perl with the
Nobel Prize in Physics, and his work with
Clyde Cowan in first detecting the neutrino was recognized by the
National Academy of Sciences. Reines also received many other awards, including the
National Medal of Science.
Reines remained on UCI's faculty until his death of natural causes in 1998, aged 80. (After 1988 his title was
professor emeritus.) In addition to his wife, Reines was survived by his son Robert G., his daughter Alisa K. Cowden, and six grandchildren.
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