Raymond Davis Jr.

Raymond Davis Jr. was an American chemist and physicist born October 14, 1914. In the 1960s he led the Homestake experiment, a detector buried deep underground designed to catch neutrinos streaming from the Sun. For more than twenty years the experiment ran, and it worked — the first time anyone had detected solar neutrinos. The results also revealed a puzzle: fewer neutrinos arrived than theory predicted, a discrepancy that eventually reshaped physics. Davis shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics for the work. He died May 31, 2006.