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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.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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