Clyde L. Cowan

Clyde L. Cowan.

Clyde Lorrain Cowan Jr. (born December 6, 1919 in Detroit , Michigan , † May 24, 1974 in Bethesda, Maryland ) was an American physicist .

He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering from the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy in Rolla .

From 1936 to 1940 he served as a reserve officer. When the USA entered the war in 1941, he was a second lieutenant and later moved to the 8th Air Force unit under Dwight D. Eisenhower in London . He worked with the Royal Air Force as a liaison officer and returned to America in 1945. In 1946 he left the military and attended Washington University in St. Louis . There he received his master's and doctoral degrees in 1949.

He met Frederick Reines at the Los Alamos National Laboratory . From 1951 both worked together on the problem of experimentally demonstrating the existence of neutrinos . They successfully completed the project in 1956 at the Savannah River Site nuclear facility with the Cowan Reines neutrino experiment , for which Frederick Reines was honored much later, in 1995, with the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Clyde Cowan later taught for a year as a physics professor at George Washington University in Washington, DC before moving to the Catholic University of America there .

From 1943 he was married to the Englishwoman Betty Eleanor Dunham and had ten children, seven of whom died early. He died on May 24, 1974 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

His grandson James Riordon is the head of media affairs for the American Physical Society and was responsible for the concept of the Einstein @ home project .

Publications

• Frederick Reines & Clyde L. Cowan: The Neutrino , Nature 178, 446 (1956).

Web links

• Clyde Lorrain Cowan, Jr. Arlington National Cemetery. Retrieved February 3, 2009 .