Raymond Davis, Jr.

The sun derives its energy from fusion reactions in which hydrogen is transformed into helium.

My father was a photographer at the National Bureau of Standards. A self-educated man, he never finished high school, but in his career at the National Bureau of Standards, he made many useful inventions and eventually became chief of the Photographic Technology Section.

In high school and college, I gathered a number of medals for marksmanship, but I have long since abandoned this activity, having concluded that the world would be a better place with fewer sharpshooters.

I was educated in the Washington public schools and attended the University of Maryland as a day student, graduating in 1938 with a degree in chemistry. After working for the Dow Chemical Company in Midland, Michigan, for a year, I returned to the University of Maryland to take a Master's degree before going on to Yale to pursue a doctorate.

In the spring of 1948, I was able to join the newly created Brookhaven National Laboratory, which was dedicated to finding peaceful uses for atomic energy.

Every time four protons are turned into a helium nucleus, two neutrinos are produced. These neutrinos take only two seconds to reach the surface of the Sun and another eight minutes or so to reach the Earth. Thus, neutrinos tell us what happened in the center of the Sun eight minutes ago.