Frederick Reines - Early Life

Early Life

Reines was born in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of Jewish emigrants to the US from Russia and a paternal relative of the Rabbi Yitzchak Yaacov Reines, as the youngest of four children. Reines and his family moved to upstate New York, where he spent much of his childhood in a small town where his father ran a country store. Looking back, Reines said: "My early childhood memories center around this typical American country store and life in a small American town, including fourth of July celebrations marked by fireworks and patriotic music played from a pavilion bandstand."

Reines was an Eagle Scout, and also participated in singing in a chorus, performing solo roles in pieces, including Händel's Messiah. He was encouraged to take lessons with a well-known voice coach at the Metropolitan Opera, where they were provided for him free of charge, since he could not afford to pay for them.

Reines later lived in North Bergen, New Jersey, residing on Kennedy Boulevard and 57th Street. Because North Bergen did not have a high school for its residents during Reines' youth, he attended Union Hill High School (what is today Union Hill Middle School) in Union Hill, New Jersey (what is today Union City, New Jersey). He graduated from Union Hill in 1935.

Reines had a passion for creating and building things, and exhibited a love of science in his childhood. In his autobiography given to the Nobel Prize Committee, he recalled, "The first stirrings of interest in science that I remember occurred during a moment of boredom at religious school, when, looking out of the window at twilight through a hand curled to simulate a telescope, I noticed something peculiar about the light; it was the phenomenon of diffraction. That began for me a fascination with light." Ironically, Reines’ excelled in literary and history courses, but received average or low marks in science and math in his freshman year of high school, though he improved in those areas by his junior and senior years through the encouragement of an unidentified teacher who gave him a key to the school laboratory and gave him permission to work whenever he wanted. This cultivated a love of science in Reines by his senior year, and led him in the direction of a career in science. In response to a question seniors were asked for a yearbook quote, Reines responded, "To be a physicist extraordinaire." Reines graduated from high school in 1935. Reines said that his "early education was strongly influenced" by his older siblings. They were studious pupils who became doctors and lawyers.

Between college and graduate school, Reines briefly considered pursuing a professional singing career, but ultimately decided against it.

Reines attended Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, where he earned his M.E. and M.S. degrees, before receiving his Ph.D. from New York University.