Clyde Cowan

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

At the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy in Rolla, Missouri, he earned the degree in Chemical Engineering Bachelor of Science.

From 1936 to 1940 he served as a reserve officer. 1941 the USA entered the war, he was a second lieutenant and later moved to the 8th unit of the Air Force under Dwight D. Eisenhower in London. He worked with the Royal Air Force as a liaison officer in 1945 and returned back to America. In 1946, he left the military service and attended Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. There he received in 1949 the master and doctoral degrees. In the Los Alamos National Laboratory, he met with Frederick Reines. From 1951, both worked together on the problem to prove the existence of neutrinos experimentally. They joined the project in 1956 in the Savannah River Site nuclear facility with the Cowan - Reines neutrino experiment successfully, much later for the Frederick Reines, 1995, was honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics.

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

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

His grandson James Riordon is the Head of Media Affairs of the American Physical Society and was responsible for the concept of the project Einstein @ home.

Publications

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