Frederick Reines stands beside a stack of tubes he was assembling into a device to detect the neutrino, an elusive sub-atomic particle he would become the first to find. It was 1962 and Reines (pronounced RYE-ness) was chair of the Physics Department at Case Institute of Technology.

He had come to Case in 1959 after helping to build the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. The Manhattan Project sparked his quest to detect the rumored neutrino, a ghostlike particle generated by atomic reactions and exploding stars and thought to make up much of the universe.

Case and Cleveland had never seen the like. A booming baritone, Reines sang with the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus at concerts conducted by George Szell. A passionate scientist, he all but moved mountains in pursuit of discoveries.

To avoid cosmic rays from space, Reines moved his neutrino experiments thousands of feet beneath Lake Erie in the Morton Salt mines near Fairport Harbor. Later, he set up his detection equipment in a mile-deep gold mine in South Africa. There, in 1964, Reines and Case colleague Thomas Jenkins became the first to observe neutrinos generated naturally in the earth’s atmosphere, achieving a breakthrough in our understanding of particle physics.

Reines left Case in 1966 to become founding dean of physical sciences at the University of California, Irvine, but he continued his experiments in the Lake Erie salt mines. In 1995, three years before his death, the father of the neutrino was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.