Lederman suggested that the discovery was of a class that could well lead to a Nobel Prize, but only if one or two scientists could be singled out for credit from among the large group that made the discovery. Physicists have debated for decades over whether neutrinos, the most abundant of all subatomic particles, have some tiny amount of mass. Some thought that, like the photons that carry beams of light or radio waves, they might have none at all. It's irrefutable evidence'' that the tiny particles really do have mass, said Boston University physicist Larry Sulak, a member of the discovery team, in describing the several lines of evidence produced by experiments at the huge Super-Kamiokande detector. Neutrino '98'' in Takayama, Japan.
Neutrinos are among the oddest discoveries of modern physics.
They are similar to electrons, the tiny particles that make up the outer shells of atoms. But unlike electrons, they have no electrical charge at all. As a result they have virtually no interaction with other forms of matter. The particles are so tiny and elusive that they could hurtle through a quadrillion-mile thickness of solid lead without ever bumping into anything. Pauli was proved right about his theory, but wrong about the possibility of detection, when neutrinos were first proved to exist in 1956 at an atomic reactor in Washington state.