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Ghost Particle: In Search of the Elusive and Mysterious Neutrino
The fascinating story of science in pursuit of the ghostly, ubiquitous subatomic particle—the neutrino.
Isaac Asimov once observed of the “The only reason scientists suggested its existence was their need to make calculations come out even. And yet the nothing-particle was not a nothing at all.” In fact, as one of the most enigmatic and most populous particles in the universe—about 100 trillion are flying through you every second—the neutrino may hold the clues to some of our deepest cosmic mysteries. In Ghost Particle , Alan Chodos and James Riordon recount the dramatic history of the neutrino—from the initial suggestion that the particle was merely a desperate solution to a puzzle that threatened to undermine the burgeoning field of particle physics to its modern role in illuminating the universe via neutrino telescopes.
Alan Chodos and James Riordon are deft and engaging guides as they conduct readers through the experiences of intrepid scientists and the challenges they faced, and continue to face, in their search for the ghostly neutrino. Along the way, the authors provide expert insight into the significance of neutrino research from the particle’s first, momentous discovery to recent, revolutionary advances in neutrino detection and astronomy. Chodos and Riordon describe how neutrinos may soon provide clues to some of the biggest questions we encounter today, including how to understand the dark matter that makes up most of the universe—and why anything exists in the universe at all.
Isaac Asimov once observed of the “The only reason scientists suggested its existence was their need to make calculations come out even. And yet the nothing-particle was not a nothing at all.” In fact, as one of the most enigmatic and most populous particles in the universe—about 100 trillion are flying through you every second—the neutrino may hold the clues to some of our deepest cosmic mysteries. In Ghost Particle , Alan Chodos and James Riordon recount the dramatic history of the neutrino—from the initial suggestion that the particle was merely a desperate solution to a puzzle that threatened to undermine the burgeoning field of particle physics to its modern role in illuminating the universe via neutrino telescopes.
Alan Chodos and James Riordon are deft and engaging guides as they conduct readers through the experiences of intrepid scientists and the challenges they faced, and continue to face, in their search for the ghostly neutrino. Along the way, the authors provide expert insight into the significance of neutrino research from the particle’s first, momentous discovery to recent, revolutionary advances in neutrino detection and astronomy. Chodos and Riordon describe how neutrinos may soon provide clues to some of the biggest questions we encounter today, including how to understand the dark matter that makes up most of the universe—and why anything exists in the universe at all.
320 pages, Hardcover
Published February 28, 2023
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April 25, 2024Nature's short review, https://www.nature.com/articles/d4158...
"Proposed by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930, detected by Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines in 1956 and dubbed the “nothing-particle” by Isaac Asimov in 1966, neutrinos — first created in the Big Bang — are still highly mysterious, despite endless experimental investigation. Hence their current nickname of ‘ghost particle’ — the title of physicist Alan Chodos and journalist James Riordan’s enjoyable, non-mathematical portrait. “You have over 300 Big Bang neutrinos in the tip of your pinky at this moment,” they write."
"Proposed by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930, detected by Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines in 1956 and dubbed the “nothing-particle” by Isaac Asimov in 1966, neutrinos — first created in the Big Bang — are still highly mysterious, despite endless experimental investigation. Hence their current nickname of ‘ghost particle’ — the title of physicist Alan Chodos and journalist James Riordan’s enjoyable, non-mathematical portrait. “You have over 300 Big Bang neutrinos in the tip of your pinky at this moment,” they write."
July 5, 2023
Tried, but couldn't make past 100 pages.
This book failed for predominantly two reason:
1. It did not make any real case for caring about the neutrino. Utimately, all I got out of it is that it represents one of the components of the standard model, the one physicists use to make sure all the theories of mass and energy preserve the laws of conservation at the sub-atomic level.
2. The science was not presented in a way that was clear to me. The text would have benefited from a more generous usage of illustrations, and more (some? any?) non-scientific pre-publication readers to show where the proper foundations had not been laid. I have a Master's degree from MIT, so I'm not completely ignorant regarding math and science, but I found myself having to Google alot of the discussion in the book
For me, the best parts of the book were the discriptions of the experiments by early neutrino hunters. But even these often went over my head.
This book failed for predominantly two reason:
1. It did not make any real case for caring about the neutrino. Utimately, all I got out of it is that it represents one of the components of the standard model, the one physicists use to make sure all the theories of mass and energy preserve the laws of conservation at the sub-atomic level.
2. The science was not presented in a way that was clear to me. The text would have benefited from a more generous usage of illustrations, and more (some? any?) non-scientific pre-publication readers to show where the proper foundations had not been laid. I have a Master's degree from MIT, so I'm not completely ignorant regarding math and science, but I found myself having to Google alot of the discussion in the book
For me, the best parts of the book were the discriptions of the experiments by early neutrino hunters. But even these often went over my head.
March 22, 2023
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.
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.
April 6, 2024
Per a four-star reviewer, it's workmanlike, but my judgment on the worth of that is lower than his. This might be 3.5, but I can't bump it to 4. Or, it might be 2.5, but, I'm not bumping down to 2.
OK, the details.
If you've read Asimov's book on the neutrino, you can grok the first one-quarter of this. If you've read anything newer, you can grok the first one third.
The meat of the book is post-2000 experiments to try to nail down the mass of the three different known neutrinos, and also to find out of a fourth neutrino, the so-called sterile neutrino, exists.
Sadly, the last couple of chapters are purely speculative, and not even good speculation. Did we need a whole chapter, even if a short one, on the idea that neutrinos might be tachyons? No.
Given that neutrino detector sensitivity won't have major improvement for decades if not generations, do we need most of the last chapter discussing neutrinos as alien civilization detectors? No. And, a MUCH more thorough discussion of the Drake equation was needed as the run-up, anyway.
One "issue" early on was something not at all about neutrinos. The authors, in talking about the "Copernican revolution," reference Kuhn. First, Kuhn's "scientific revolutions" thesis is considered to be somewhat overstated today by philosophers and historians of science, at least in a "hard" version. Second? Given that Hellenistic Greek astronomers proposed heliocentric as well as geocentric theories of the solar system, it's hard to talk about a Copernican revolution, even if he didn't know about heliocentric Hellenistic astronomy. Related? The authors do NOT mention that Copernicus, in his particular version of heliocentrism, required MORE epicycles than Ptolemy. The real "revolution," if one will, was by Kepler with both his stumbling on — AND accepting — ellipses, tied with his laws of planetary motion, articulated pre-Newton no less.
That said, per Wiki, in the 11th-12th centuries, some Muslim astronomers were considering geocentrism AND at least one was speculating about elliptical orbits.
And, with that? Even though it was just a couple of throwaway paragraphs by the authors? It does go down to 2 stars and does get the "meh" tag. Per the four-star reviewer, there are presumably better books about neutrinos.
And, science writers? For all the reasons above and more, let's move on from "Copernican revolution."
OK, the details.
If you've read Asimov's book on the neutrino, you can grok the first one-quarter of this. If you've read anything newer, you can grok the first one third.
The meat of the book is post-2000 experiments to try to nail down the mass of the three different known neutrinos, and also to find out of a fourth neutrino, the so-called sterile neutrino, exists.
Sadly, the last couple of chapters are purely speculative, and not even good speculation. Did we need a whole chapter, even if a short one, on the idea that neutrinos might be tachyons? No.
Given that neutrino detector sensitivity won't have major improvement for decades if not generations, do we need most of the last chapter discussing neutrinos as alien civilization detectors? No. And, a MUCH more thorough discussion of the Drake equation was needed as the run-up, anyway.
One "issue" early on was something not at all about neutrinos. The authors, in talking about the "Copernican revolution," reference Kuhn. First, Kuhn's "scientific revolutions" thesis is considered to be somewhat overstated today by philosophers and historians of science, at least in a "hard" version. Second? Given that Hellenistic Greek astronomers proposed heliocentric as well as geocentric theories of the solar system, it's hard to talk about a Copernican revolution, even if he didn't know about heliocentric Hellenistic astronomy. Related? The authors do NOT mention that Copernicus, in his particular version of heliocentrism, required MORE epicycles than Ptolemy. The real "revolution," if one will, was by Kepler with both his stumbling on — AND accepting — ellipses, tied with his laws of planetary motion, articulated pre-Newton no less.
That said, per Wiki, in the 11th-12th centuries, some Muslim astronomers were considering geocentrism AND at least one was speculating about elliptical orbits.
And, with that? Even though it was just a couple of throwaway paragraphs by the authors? It does go down to 2 stars and does get the "meh" tag. Per the four-star reviewer, there are presumably better books about neutrinos.
And, science writers? For all the reasons above and more, let's move on from "Copernican revolution."
August 26, 2025
This is one of those books that, in my opinion, lacks a clear purpose: too easy for physicists and scientists, too difficult for those with a basic high school education... I mean, it's not unreadable, but it takes a lot of information for granted and makes you feel uneasy, as if you've missed some lines of text.
The historical context is also not very interesting and often left unfinished (I am thinking about chapter on Majorana)
The historical context is also not very interesting and often left unfinished (I am thinking about chapter on Majorana)
Read
August 13, 2024pretty straightforward information about neutrinos, what they are, what their characteristics are, the history of the theoretical decisions for their proposal, the history of experiments for their detection, their mass states, their types (electron, tau, mu), their sources (solar, cosmic ray, Big Bang relic), their formation from beta decay and inverse beta decay, their oscillations, etc.
April 9, 2024
Amazing Book
I rarely read physics without equations and I didn't expect to learn much from this, Boy, was I wrong.
In addition to many recent developments, I learned a lot of enriching background about events I already knew about all the way back to Pauli.
Excellent book.
I rarely read physics without equations and I didn't expect to learn much from this, Boy, was I wrong.
In addition to many recent developments, I learned a lot of enriching background about events I already knew about all the way back to Pauli.
Excellent book.
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