So Enrico Fermi called Pauli’s particle the neutrino, Italian for “little neutral one.”) 7. Subatomic particles are actually waves (sometimes) Thomson won a Nobel Prize in 1906 for the experiments establishing the existence of the first known subatomic particle, the electron. So he must have been surprised when, in 1937, his son George also won a Nobel Prize — for demonstrating that electrons (at least in some experiments) were actually waves.