EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FOR THE FIRST TIME
As part of Project Poltergeist, a group of scientists led by physicists Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan of the Los Alamos National Laboratory discovered the first evidence of neutrinos. The neutrino was, and continues to be, regarded as a “ghostly” particle that flitted through matter without leaving much of an imprint. To ultimately catch the ghost, the scientists employed a nuclear reactor, which produces a massive amount of neutrinos. They used a 10-ton detector close to a fission reactor at the Savannah River Plant for five months to collect data. “We are glad to inform you that we have certainly found neutrinos,” they said in a 1956 telegraph to Wolfgang Pauli.
