Word: neutrinos
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Detecting neutrinos with ordinary instruments is like catching bats with a steam shovel. Since they carry no electric charge and are vanishingly small, they pay little attention to matter. The average neutrino can probably pass through billions or trillions of miles of dense material without being stopped by it. Neutrons do, however, "interact" slightly with protons; so there is a very small chance that if a great many neutrinos pass through a material rich in protons, a few of them will be intercepted in a way that can be detected...
...three times an hour when the reactor was in operation, the detecting instruments registered "an event"-two flashes of light of exactly correct intensity and timing. This meant that a single neutrino (out of many billions per second) had hit a proton (out of billions along its path) and turned it into a positron and a neutron. After watching this happen for a total of 1,371 hours and taking elaborate precautions to eliminate false signals, Reines and Cowan announced that they had really detected neutrinos. AEC Commissioner Willard F. Libby congratulated them on their "magnificent accomplishment." Now nuclear physics...
...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...
...neutrino is abolished, physics may be threatened by a more sweeping revolution. Physicists would balk at admitting that matter or energy just disappears. They would try to explain where matter or energy goes to, and the search might reveal a new world of physics...