VT College of Science presents Breakthrough - A Student Research Magazine Vol. 1 No. 1 | Page 9

BREAKTHROUGH MAGAZINE | 2014

particles...” [1]. Pauli’s proposition was correct, and we now know that the neutrino is a fundamental particle that is weakly interacting
and electrically neutral. However, these properties make the neutrino extraordinarily difficult to detect, and realizing this difficulty Pauli
lamented “I have done a terrible thing, I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected” [1].
More than 20 years had passed since the neutrino was first theorized, and there was still no convincing experimental evidence for its
existence, but then in the 1950’s two scientists, Clyde L. Cowan Jr. and Frederick Reines set out to definitively prove the existence of
the neutrino. Cowan and Reines proposed to observe the neutrino via the inverse b