Frederick Reines; UC Irvine Professor Discovered Neutrinos
Frederick Reines, a UC Irvine professor whose discovery of one of the smallest particles in the universe earned him the 1995 Nobel Prize in physics, has died after a long fight against Parkinson’s disease.
Reines, 80, died late Wednesday at UC Irvine Medical Center in Orange. His discovery of what is known as a neutrino set in motion a new way of looking at the universe.
“He started a whole new field of physics . . . one of the most exciting fields of physics,” said UC Irvine physics professor Hank Sobel.
Martin Perl, who shared the Nobel Prize with Reines for his own work in physics, called his colleague “an energetic man with a fresh view of looking at things.”
“He always had experiments going in different ways from everyone else,” Perl said.
Reines was born in Paterson, N.J. He received bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Steven Institute of Technology in New Jersey and a doctorate from New York University.
Reines said that the first time he remembered being interested in science “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 a fascination with light.”
Although he was then more interested in literature and, by his own account, did not do well in science, he wrote in his high school yearbook that his ambition was “to be a physicist extraordinaire.”
In 1944, before completing his thesis, he went to work on the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico. He stayed there for 15 years.
In 1951, he decided to study neutrinos. An Italian physicist had theorized that the subatomic particle existed, but no one could prove it.
Reines and a colleague moved their work to a new nuclear reactor on the Savannah River in South Carolina, building an experimental apparatus the size of a small room.
In 1956, using their creation to measure particles smaller than atoms, the researchers were able to prove that neutrinos exist.
Reines and his fellow scientists at UC Irvine and the University of Michigan detected a spurt of neutrinos from an exploding star in 1988, strengthening theories about the universe.
In a 1985 interview with The Times, Reines tried to explain the importance of his discovery. “I don’t say that the neutrino is going to be a practical thing,” he said. “But it has been a time-honored pattern that science leads, and then technology comes along, and then, put together, these things make an enormous difference in how we live.”
Reines left Los Alamos in 1959 to become head of the physics department at Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland. He moved to UC Irvine in 1966 as the founding dean of the School of Physical Sciences. He returned to teaching and research full time in 1974 and retired in 1988, becoming a professor emeritus.
Besides the Nobel, Reines received the National Medal of Science, the Franklin Medal from the Benjamin Franklin Institute Committee on Science and the Arts, the Bruno Rossi Prize and the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize. He was also named to the National Academy of Sciences.
He is survived by his wife, Sylvia; a son, Robert G. Reines of Ojo Sarco, N.M.; a daughter, Alisa K. Cowden of Trumansburg, N.Y.; and six grandchildren.
