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Herald October 7, 2015

Sometimes the best thing to do is smile and nod. So that’s what Everard Kent did 25 years ago. “I had no idea what they were talking about,” Kent recalled Wednesday. “I had never even heard of a neutrino before.”

It was 1990 and Kent, a civil engineer with Montreal’s Monenco Engineering Co., was listening to a team of physicists say they were going to pin down the tiny, nearly massless particles called neutrinos that fly near the speed of light.

Good for them, but the problem was they needed engineers to help them.

Kent, an engineer from Truro who graduated from the Technical University of Nova Scotia, now part of Dalhousie, was on the team tasked by Monenco to make it happen.

“The scientists told us what they wanted, and we helped them get it,” said Kent, 80.

Engineering is often called an applied science — engineers put to work the discoveries of pure scientists. In the case of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, the engineers were building the thing scientists would use to do the research that led to Arthur McDonald of Sydney and Japan’s Takaaki Kajita winning the Nobel Prize for physics Tuesday.

Kent, who is retired and lives in Ontario, is adamant that the work of the team of about 20 engineers deserves no credit for the discovery that neutrinos have mass, throwing a wrench into the standard model of particle physics.

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