Clyde Cowan

01 / The Detroit story

The Detroit story

Cowan was born in Detroit in 1919, the oldest of four children, but his family moved to St. Louis, where he grew up. He studied chemical engineering at the Missouri School of Mines, served with the Army Air Forces in World War II and afterward earned a doctorate in physics at Washington University in St. Louis. At the Los Alamos laboratory he teamed with Frederick Reines to catch the neutrino, a nearly massless particle predicted in 1930 but never observed. They placed large tanks of liquid scintillator next to the Savannah River nuclear reactor in South Carolina and in 1956 announced that they had detected neutrinos streaming from it. Cowan later taught physics at the Catholic University of America in Washington. He died in 1974, and the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery went to Reines alone.

Highlights

1. Co-discovered the neutrino with Frederick Reines (Cowan–Reines experiment, 1956)
2. Experiment run at the Savannah River reactor, South Carolina
3. Physics professor at the Catholic University of America
4. Born in Detroit, 1919; raised in St. Louis