Shortest distance to a Nobel Prize in Physics: study and discover something about neutrinos 1930: Pauli proposed an invisible neutral particle to explain the energy missing from beta decay. (His 1945 Nobel was for the exclusion principle, not the neutrino.) 1934: Fermi built it into his theory of beta decay and named it the "neutrino." (His 1938 Nobel was for work on neutron-induced radioactivity.) 1956: Cowan and Reines first detected neutrinos at the Savannah River nuclear reactor. Nobel 1995: Frederick Reines; Cowan had died in 1974. 1962: A second flavor, the muon neutrino, was discovered at Brookhaven. Nobel 1988: Leon Lederman, Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger. Late 1960s onward: Ray Davis found only a third of the expected solar neutrinos, creating the "solar neutrino problem." Nobel 2002: Raymond Davis Jr. 1987: Detectors caught neutrinos from Supernova 1987A, which began neutrino astronomy. Nobel 2002: Masatoshi Koshiba, shared with Davis. 1998–2002: Super-Kamiokande and SNO showed that neutrinos change flavor, so they must have mass. Nobel 2015: Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald. 2000: The third flavor, the tau neutrino, was observed directly at Fermilab. 2013: IceCube detected high-energy neutrinos from beyond our galaxy. Today: JUNO, DUNE and Hyper-Kamiokande aim to pin down neutrino masses and whether neutrinos help explain why matter beat antimatter.