Los Alamos National Laboratory · Attribution

Joined the Manhattan Project's Theoretical Division under Richard Feynman in 1944, then spent the following decade chasing a particle many physicists assumed could never be observed. Working with Clyde Cowan at reactor sites in Hanford and Savannah River, he detected the neutrino directly for the first time in 1956, and later helped detect neutrinos from a 1987 supernova, opening the field of neutrino astronomy. He won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for the original discovery.