Skip to main content

Ghost Particle: Alan Chodos and James Riordan ****

The popular science market is reasonably well served with books on the neutrino. Frank Close's Neutrino is still the best on the basics despite being over ten years old, while Leonard Cole's Chasing the Ghost  gives interesting insights to the work of Cowan and Reines who first detected it. But Ghost Particle does provide enough that new and different to make it a worthy addition to the field.

Alan Chodos and James Riordan give us a good description of why the neutrino was first needed by particle physics and significantly later discovered. They take us through the unlikely attempts at detection and the puzzle over why the Sun appeared to have around a third of the neutrinos that theory predicted it would have in its output, including some interesting material on alternative theories as to why this was the case. There's good coverage of the brief explosion of interest when it was thought neutrinos were detected travelling faster than light and a look at neutrino applications, including reaching astronomical places that other particles (notably photons) cannot reach.

While lacking Close's mastery of making complex science simple and approachable, Chodos and Riordan give us workmanlike writing that gets the point across. They are particularly strong on the argument over whether or not neutrinos are their own antiparticles, which has had a powerful impact on the development of our understanding of these elusive particles.

Sometimes the writing can be a touch clumsy. Chodos and Riordan spend around five pages repeatedly saying 'Majorana's model produced the same result as Dirac's without the need for a negative energy sea' in slightly different ways - by the end I was shouting 'We get it, guys.' Sometimes also the writers fall into the trap of not explaining enough, something that is common when academics write a book like this, but in a collaboration between a physicist and a science writer you would hope it would have been avoided.

The best example of insufficient explanation is that we read of relic neutrinos (left over from the early days of the universe): 'These relic neutrinos have cooled to just a few degrees above absolute zero…' - physicists are familiar with what is meant by the temperature of a particle, but it's not something an ordinary reader is likely to understand in this context without some expansion. Also, neutrinos are often spoken of as travelling at near the speed of light, yet unlike photons, the only way a massive particle can have a very low temperature is by travelling very slowly, which again needs expanding given the way neutrinos are widely portrayed as moving at near the speed of light, exploring the impact of the expansion on the universe on the speed of massive particles travelling through it.

Overall, though, a very creditable picture of the theoretical basis, discovery and subsequent expansion of our knowledge of these ghostly particles.

Hardback:   
Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Meteorite Hunters - Joshua Howgego *****

This is an extremely engaging read on a subject that everyone is aware of, but few of us know much detail about. Usually, if I'm honest, geology tends to be one of the least entertaining scientific subjects but here (I suppose, given that geo- refers to the Earth it ought to be astrology... but that might be a touch misleading). Here, though, there is plenty of opportunity to capture our interest. The first part of the book takes us both to see meteorites and to hear stories of meteorite hunters, whose exploits vary from erudite science trips to something more like an Indiana Jones outing. Joshua Howgego takes us back to the earliest observations and discoveries of meteorites and the initial doubt that they could have extraterrestrial sources, through to explorations of deserts and the Antarctic - both locations where it tends to be easier to find them. I, certainly, had no idea about the use of camera networks to track incoming meteors, which not only try to estimate where they wi...

Against the Odds - John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin ****

The number of women working in STEM subjects has expanded dramatically, but as John and Mary Gribbin make clear, in the history of science this is a very recent occurrence. Here, they bring us the stories of 12 women, from Eunice Newton Foote, born in 1819, to Vera Rubin, born in 1928 - effectively covering nearly 200 years in that Rubin died as recently as 2016. There are some names that will already be familiar from popular science histories (and deservedly so). You will find, for instance, Dorothy Hodgkin and Rosalind Franklin represented. But there are plenty like Foote that few will have come across, including Inge Lehmann, Chien-Sung Wu and Lucy Slater. While arguably Foote is there primarily to demonstrate the difficulties she faced (her discovery of an aspect of greenhouse gas behaviour was independently bettered within weeks), the rest have all made significant discoveries or developments against the odds and often missed out the recognition the deserved. The most prominent ob...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...