25 Facts About Frederick Reines

Frederick Reines was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for his co-detection of the neutrino with Clyde Cowan in the neutrino experiment.

Frederick Reines participated in a number of nuclear tests, culminating in his becoming the director of the Operation Greenhouse test series in the Pacific in 1951.

Frederick Reines dedicated the major part of his career to the study of the neutrino's properties and interactions, which work would influence study of the neutrino for many researchers to come.

Frederick Reines was born in Paterson, New Jersey, one of four children of Gussie and Israel Reines.

Frederick Reines's parents were Jewish emigrants from the same town in Russia, but only met in New York City, where they were later married.

Frederick Reines had an older sister, Paula, who became a doctor, and two older brothers, David and William, who became lawyers.

Frederick Reines said that his "early education was strongly influenced" by his studious siblings.

Frederick Reines was the great-nephew of the Rabbi Yitzchak Yaacov Reines, the founder of Mizrachi, a religious Zionist movement.

From an early age, Frederick Reines exhibited an interest in science, and liked creating and building things.

Ironically, Frederick 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 improved in those areas by his junior and senior years through the encouragement of a teacher who gave him a key to the school laboratory.

Frederick Reines studied cosmic rays there under Serge A Korff, but wrote his thesis under the supervision of Richard D Present on "Nuclear fission and the liquid drop model of the nucleus".

Frederick Reines joined Feynman's T-4 Group, which was part of Hans Bethe's T Division.

Frederick Reines participated in a number of nuclear tests, and writing reports on their results.

Frederick Reines studied the effects of nuclear blasts, and co-authored a paper with John von Neumann on Mach stem formation, an important aspect of an air blast wave.

In spite or perhaps because of his role in these nuclear tests, Frederick Reines was concerned about the dangers of radioactive pollution from atmospheric nuclear tests, and became an advocate of underground nuclear testing.

Frederick Reines was a delegate at the Atoms for Peace Conference in Geneva in 1958.

Frederick Reines had a booming voice, and had been a singer since childhood.

In 1966, Frederick Reines took most of his neutrino research team with him when he left for the new University of California, Irvine, becoming its first dean of physical sciences.

At UCI, Frederick 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.

Frederick Reines had prepared for the possibility of measuring the distant events of a supernova explosion.

Supernova explosions are rare, but Frederick Reines thought he might be lucky enough to see one in his lifetime, and be able to catch the neutrinos streaming from it in his specially-designed detectors.

In 1995, Reines was honored, along with Martin L Perl with the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with Cowan in first detecting the neutrino.

Frederick Reines was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1980 and a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1994.

Frederick Reines remained dean of physical sciences at UCI until 1974, and became a professor emeritus in 1988, but he continued teaching until 1991, and remained on UCI's faculty until his death.

Frederick Reines died after a long illness at the University of California, Irvine Medical Center in Orange, California, on August 26,1998.