Wang Ganchang - The WW II Years

The WW II Years

Following the invasion of China by Japan in July 1937, Professor Wang Ganchang was forced to retreat with all the faculty of the Zhejiang University where he was a professor, to the primitive western mountainous hinterland of China.

Enduring difficult conditions, he nonetheless tried in 1939 to find on photographic films tracks of nuclear fission caused by neutron bombardment of cadmium acid.

In 1941, he first proposed an experiment to prove the existence of the neutrino by capturing K-electrons in nuclear reactions. Unfortunately, he was unable to implement the experiment because of the war. Fifteen years later Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan employed his suggestion and detected the neutrino in 1956 winning forty years later the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics. (In fact, the suggested technique of Prof Wang is only remotely related to the Reines, Cowan neutrino experiment. Reactor neutrinos and the inverse beta reaction were used, not a radioactive substance and K-Capture.)