Word: neutrino
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...apparatus at Hanford was designed to detect the neutrino, a ghostly particle that the physicists invented to make their nuclear equations come out even. When an atom disintegrates, the mass of its fragments plus the mass equivalent of the energy released should equal the mass of the original atom. Often they do not; a small amount of mass disappears as completely as a snowflake in the ocean. This is serious because the physical sciences are based on the principle that mass can turn into energy and vice versa, but neither can just disappear...
...save the situation, the physicists invented the neutrino, which they think of as a particle with less than one two-thousandth of the mass of an electron. It has no electric charge, and it therefore reacts very slightly with matter, sailing through solid metal or rock almost as if they were empty space. About 5% of the energy of a nuclear reactor (so says the theory) goes off in the form of neutrinos, and most of those that shoot downward pass right through the earth...
Flashing Particles. Fortified with this knowledge, two Atomic Energy Commission physicists, Frederick L. Reines and Clyde Cowan Jr., gathered an erudite task force at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and went hunting neutrinos. Theory told them that if a neutrino hits a proton, as may happen on very rare occasions, the reaction should yield a neutron and a positron (positive electron). If this happens in a liquid that scintillates in the proper manner, both particles will give flashes of light...
...Cowan regards this small difference as conclusive. But they have gained experience, much of it of practical value to the bomb makers at Los Alamos. A second series of experiments will be starting soon. "Then," say Reines and Cowan, "we should be able to say definitely either that the neutrino exists or that it does not exist...
...Revolution? On the answer to this question hang enormous issues. Physicists are already comparing the neutrino hunt with the igth century hunt for the "celestial ether," which was then considered necessary to carry waves of light through the vacuum of space. When the Michelson-Morley experiment (reported in 1887) proved that the ether does not exist, physics was thrown into confusion and had to be rescued painfully by Einstein's relativity...