Masatoshi Koshiba , Japan shared half of the Nobel Prize for Physics with Raymond Davis, USA in 2002 "for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos" The other half was awarded to Riccardo Giacconi.
Video recorded in 2004. Koshiba explains that he did not coming from a family of scientists, his father was an army officer and his mother a housewife. He became a physics student at Tokyo University. As an experimental physicist he started working on the Kamioka NDE experiment (Nuclear Decay Experiment and then Photo Decay Experiment).
He describes the apparatus that he built to do the experiment which was smaller than the apparatus being built in the US to do similar work. Koshiba’s solution to this was to make his apparatus more sensitive. Eventually he spent over one-and-a-half years modifying the Kamioka NDE detector which enabled him to detect solar neutrinos.
When asked about his religious beliefs he says ‘Science deals with only things that can be confirmed – God does not come into Science!’ At the end of the day Koshiba says “I am the same as anyone else!”