Success, Tenacity, and the Aid of Global Colleagues
Noble Prize winner and long-time Academy member Raymod Davis, Jr., PhD shares his advice to find success as a scientist.
Published January 1, 2003
By Dan Van Atta
Academy Contributor

Curiosity, a keen focus, teamwork, and the tenacity to never stop searching for solutions: These are among the qualities that Raymond Davis, Jr., Ph.D., credits with contributing to his long and highly successful career as a physical chemist.
A long-time member of The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) and contributor to the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Davis was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics last month for detecting solar neutrinos – ghostlike particles produced in the nuclear reactions that power the sun. He shares the prize with Masatoshi Koshiba of Japan and Riccardo Giacconi of the United States.
“Neutrinos are fascinating particles, so tiny and fast that they can pass straight through everything, even the earth itself, without even slowing down,” said Davis.
“I’ve been interested in studying neutrinos since 1948, when I first read about them in a review article by physicist H.R. Crane. Back then, it was a brand-new field of study. It has captivated me for more than a half-century.”
After receiving his BS and MS from the University of Maryland, Davis earned a PhD in physical chemistry from Yale University in 1942. After his 1942-46 years of service in the U.S. Army Air Force and two years at Monsanto Chemical Company, he joined the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Chemistry Department in 1948. He received tenure in 1956 and was named senior chemist in 1964.
The Neutrino Detector
Davis is recognized for devising a method to detect solar neutrinos based on the theory that the elusive particles produce radioactive argon when they interact with a chlorine nucleus. He constructed his first solar neutrino detector in 1961, 2,300 feet below ground in a limestone mine in Ohio. Later, he mounted a full-scale experiment 4,800 feet underground, at the Homestake Gold Mine in South Dakota.
In research that spanned from 1967 to 1985, Davis consistently found only one-third of the neutrinos that standard theories predicted. His results threw the field of astrophysics into an uproar and, for nearly three decades, physicists tried to resolve the so-called “solar neutrino puzzle.”
Experiments in the 1990s using different detectors around the world eventually confirmed the solar neutrino discrepancy. Davis’ lower-than-expected neutrino detection rate is now accepted by the international science community as evidence that neutrinos have the ability to change from one of the three known neutrino forms into another. This characteristic, called neutrino oscillation, implies that the neutrino has mass, a property that is not included in the current standard model of elementary particles. (In contrast, particles of light, called photons, have zero mass.) Davis’ detector was sensitive to only one form of the neutrino, so he observed less than the expected number of solar neutrinos.
‘A Lot of Fun’
“I had a lot of fun doing the work,” Davis said, adding that he was “very surprised” when he learned it had earned him the Nobel Prize. “I could never have done it,” he hastened to add, “without the aid of colleagues all over the world.”
Davis said he is especially indebted to colleagues at Brookhaven, where he retired in 1984, but has an appointment in Brookhaven’s Chemistry Department as a research collaborator, and at the University of Pennsylvania. Davis moved to Penn in 1985 to continue experiments at the Homestake Gold Mine with Professor Kenneth Lande, and continues his association there as a research professor of Physics.
A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Davis has won numerous scientific awards. Among them, most recently, are the 2000 Wolf Prize in Physics, which he shared with Masatoshi Koshiba, of the University of Tokyo, and the 2002 National Medal of Science.
Asked to what singular factor he attributes his remarkable success, Davis responded: “People say I’m tenacious. But I’d also have to say that the atmosphere at Brookhaven gave me the freedom to focus on research that really intrigued me.”
What advice would the accomplished researcher have for today’s generation of young scientists? “I would tell aspiring students and young scientists to find a research topic that really interests them,” Davis said. “When I began my work I was intrigued by the idea of learning something new. The interesting thing about doing new experiments is that you never know what the answer is going to be.”
Also read: Adnan Waly: A Life and Career in Physics