Raymond Davis, Jr. has devoted much of his scientific career to pursuing one of the universe's great phantoms, the neutrino (low-mass grains of matter from the sun that travel at the speed of light). Davis created the first working neutrino detector while at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the results he and his collaborator John Bahcall obtained have led physicists to reevaluate the assumptions made concerning the relationship between the internal fires of stars to the internal workings of the atom.

Davis was born October 14, 1914, in Washington, D.C., the older of two brothers. His father, Raymond, worked in the photographic division of the National Bureau of Standards. His mother was Ida Rogers Younger Davis. He attended Washington, DC public schools. Although an indifferent student, Davis loved learning and early on became enamored of chemistry; he would frequently visit the library and read the Smithsonian Technical Reports. He received...