During an October ceremony in Washington, DC, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham honored this year’s Enrico Fermi Award winners, John Bahcall, Raymond Davis Jr, and Seymour Sack. The presidential award, administered by the US Department of Energy and given in recognition of a lifetime of scientific achievement in the development, production, or use of energy, was established in 1956 to encourage excellence in energy science and technology.
Bahcall and Davis share part of the award for their “innovative research in astrophysics leading to a revolution in understanding the properties of the elusive neutrino, the lightest known particle with mass.” According to the citation, their contributions to the field of solar neutrino physics and neutrino astronomy “have helped determined that neutrinos have mass and that electron neutrinos oscillate into many ‘flavors’ on their way from the Sun to the Earth.”
Bahcall is the theorist whose work made possible...
