13. Reines and Cowan Announce First Potential Neutrino Detection (1953)

Pauli had postulated the neutrino in the 1930s to explain missing energy in nuclear beta decay. In 1953 Reines and Cowan announce that they may have detected the ghostly particles using giant tanks of water placed near a nuclear reactor. They report the definitive detection of neutrinos in 1956 (in Science) and provide a full account of their experiments in 1960 (in the Physical Review).

A documentary introduces neutrino:

Like the speech at the end of this documentary by J.J. Gómez Cadenas:

An interesting question is why do we do this kind of science, why do we search for this rare event, and how do we know that we’re gonna succeed. The answer is a matter of fact is that we don’t know, that we are willing to take the risks. It’s very interesting to compare what we are trying to do in next searching for neutrinoless double beta decay experiments with the recent success of the ice cube experiment ground by Wisconsin, Wisconsin has told us is that when they propose the experiments they gave a number of arguments, none of those arguments were exactly true, none of those arguments were perfectly convincing and as a matter of fact, all the original ideas about the detector were good they’re not exactly as good as you could imagine, but at the end things work, at the end you put the faith, the passion, the years of work and you end up discovering something that you didn’t even expect, I think that what science is all about is not finding what you expect to find, is to finding something you didn’t have any idea you were going to find, is to find the unexpected.

Matthew O’Dowd talked about a new type of Neutrino: