Neutrino [Hardcover]

Frank Close (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 9, 2010 | ISBN-10: 0199574596 | ISBN-13: 978-0199574599

Neutrinos are perhaps the most enigmatic particles in the universe. These tiny, ghostly particles are formed by the billions in stars and pass through us constantly, unseen, at almost the speed of light. Yet half a century after their discovery, we still know less about them than all the other varieties of matter that have ever been seen.
In this engaging, concise volume, renowned scientist and popular writer Frank Close gives a vivid account of the discovery of neutrinos and our growing understanding of their significance, also touching on some speculative ideas concerning the possible uses of neutrinos and their role in the early universe. Close begins with the early history of the discovery of radioactivity by Henri Becquerel and Marie and Pierre Curie, the early model of the atom by Ernest Rutherford, and problems with these early atomic models, and Wolfgang Pauli's solution to that problem by inventing the concept of neutrino (named by Enrico Fermi, "neutrino" being Italian for "little neutron"). The book describes how the confirmation of Pauli's theory didn't occur until 1956, when Clyde Cowan and Fred Reines detected neutrinos, and reveals that the first "natural" neutrinos were finally detected by Reines in 1965 (before that, they had only been detected in reactors or accelerators). Close takes us to research experiments miles underground that are able to track neutrinos' fleeting impact as they pass through vast pools of cadmium chloride and he explains why they are becoming of such interest to cosmologists--if we can track where a neutrino originated we will be looking into the far distant reaches of the universe.
In telling the story of the neutrino, Close offers a fascinating portrait of a strand of modern physics that sheds light on everything from the workings of the atom and the power of the sun.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Confronting his colleagues’ failure to explain beta radiation, the revolutionary physicist Wolfang Pauli advanced a “remedy that could seem incredible.” Still, he justified himself in risking implausibility: “Only the one who dares can win.” In this engaging account of epoch-making science, Close chronicles the astonishing consequences of Pauli’s intellectual daring. Readers see how the pioneering analyses of Ernest Rutherford first exposed the impossibility of explaining beta radiation within standard scientific formulas and how Pauli resolved the anomaly by hypothesizing a mysterious subatomic particle, dubbed the “neutrino” by an intrigued Enrico Fermi. But Pauli’s brainchild left theorists skeptical and empiricists frustrated, as they repeatedly failed in their attempts to observe the particle. Refreshingly lucid writing gives general readers access to the exciting events that finally established the reality of the neutrino while opening stunning new perspectives on the origins of the cosmos. This access not only clarifies the complex science of bosons and muons but also illuminates the cross-grained humanity of Bruno Pontecorvo, the forgotten genius whose uncanny predictions about multiflavored neutrinos have, one by one, found verification, and Ray Davis, the stubbornly determined investigator of neutrinos born of solar fusion. A striking reminder that brilliant minds can penetrate the narrowest of narrow places. --Bryce Christensen

Review

"A skilled physicist, Mr. Close tells this story with verve and precision. His writing is admirably clear and eminently accessible.In a short compass, Mr. Close gives the reader a solid account of both the scientists involved and their crucial findings."
Wall Street Journal

"A cracking detective story...a highly-recommended book."
Science File

"A fine piece of scientific popularisation from one of the best scientific communicators around."
Literary Review

"Overall I much enjoyed reading Neutrino...and I would recommend it as an excellent introduction to the subject." -- A. Baha Balantekin, University of Wisconsin Madison

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (December 9, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0199574596
• ISBN-13: 978-0199574599
• Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #489,097 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #96 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Physics > Nuclear Physics > Particle Physics

More About the Author

Frank Close, OBE, is Professor of Physics at Oxford University and a Fellow of Exeter College. He was formerly vice president of the British Association for Advancement of Science and Head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. He is the author of several books, including the best-selling Lucifer's Legacy, and the winner of the Kelvin Medal of the Institute of Physics for his "outstanding contributions to the public understanding of physics."

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars What mad pursuit... January 9, 2011

By A. Jogalekar TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

These days we are all excited about the Higgs boson, but as Frank Close reminds us in his lucid and comprehensive yet succinct book, the real heroic efforts in particle physics of the twentieth century were in pursuing and hunting down the elusive neutrino. The neutrino is copiously produced by solar processes and every second billions of neutrinos astonishingly pass through our bodies, yet the particle has no charge and for a long time was postulated to have no mass, which made its detection difficult to put it mildly.

Close documents the initial theoretical efforts by Wolfgang Pauli, Enrico Fermi and others to explain atomic processes like beta decay by invoking the neutrino. But the real heroes in the story are the experimentalists who spent their entire careers and gambled their scientific lives in dogged pursuit of this ghost particle. It was Bruno Pontecorvo, a protege of Fermi who realized that one could set up chlorine tanks near nuclear reactors to detect the existence of neutrinos. Pontecorvo also proposed other creative and theoretical ideas to capture and analyze neutrinos. He certainly deserved and would probably have won a Nobel Prize had he lived long enough and not defected to the Soviet Union. After Pontecorvo, the great modern heroes of the neutrino story are Raymond Davis and John Bahcall who spent their lives making heroic efforts to nail down the identity of Fermi's "little neutral one". Davis read Pontecorvo's paper in the early 50s and decided to set up an ambitious experiment with a chlorine tank several kilometers underground in an abandoned mine. The location was necessary to shield out other radiation from cosmic rays and capture only neutrinos, which being massless can travel virtually unimpeded through the earth. At the same time their lack of charge and mass makes their interaction with matter very rare and fleeting. Bahcall was a theoretical wizard who provided increasingly accurate estimates of the rate of capture. Half a century of almost obsessive work by the two men won Davis a Nobel Prize in physics, which he should have shared with Bahcall.

The story also has amusing side-lines, such as when a group of physicists called a nearby nuclear power station to correct their calculations for antineutrinos produced by the reactor. Not knowing what an antineutrino was, the reactor personnel assumed that the particle was harmful and that the physicists were environmentalists, and they tried to assure the scientists that "no antineutrinos were being produced" which would have been impossible and violated some fundamental laws of physics. One of the most intriguing discussions in the book documents the resolution of the so-called "solar neutrino problem". The generation of neutrinos in the processes that produce solar energy had been described by Hans Bethe and others. But the actual rate of detection turned out to be far less than the theoretical postulated rate. Something was missing and this caused a lot of angst for several decades. Bahcall and Davis gambled their entire careers on this paradox. A lot of creative, Nobel Prize caliber work by many scientists involving the decay of other novel particles like muons and pions finally revealed that the neutrinos emitted by the sun were actually changing their identities between two "flavors" called electron and muon neutrinos. This process was termed neutrino oscillation. The underground detectors could detect only one flavor of neutrino, explaining the discrepancy between theory and experiment. It was one of particle physics's resounding triumphs and revealed among other things that neutrinos have a vanishingly small but finite mass.

The tremendous work with neutrinos in the 20th century has led to the flourishing of a branch of astronomy called "neutrino astronomy" in the 21st. The study of the types, numbers, directions and flavors of neutrinos can shed valuable light on astrophysical processes taking place inside exotic objects like supernovas millions of light years away. Some of the facilities set up to detect neutrinos involve football field sized underground detectors filled with hundreds of tons of material located in some of the most extreme environments on the planet like the South Pole in order to avoid interference from other sources. Neutrino astronomy has turned physicists into intrepid explorers traveling to the far reaches of the planet. Their work is ensuring that we now have an additional window into the workings of the farthest and deepest reaches of the cosmos. But as Close excitingly documents in this slim volume, the foundation for all these exciting developments was laid by the theoreticians and experimentalists who participated in some of the most exciting races and pursuits of particle physics during the twentieth century. It's a story that's as rousing as any in science.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Trapping the Ghost Particle January 29, 2011

By R. Hardy HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

We don't find it at all odd that photons, particles of light, should pass right through glass. Transparency is a property, though, that not all matter has, so the photons stop somewhere, and light up objects for us to see. It is peculiar, though, to think that other particles might find you and me transparent, or in fact shoot through the whole Earth (or anything else) as easily as photons go through glass. Such particles indeed exist. Neutrinos weigh almost nothing (gather 100,000 of them and you might outweigh an electron) and they have no charge, but they go almost as fast as light through matter as if it were not there, that is, they don't interact with whatever they are passing through. They have been called "ghost particles," but they are far more common than any spooks. According to _Neutrino_ (Oxford University Press) by physicist Frank Close, there are more neutrinos than there are electrons or any other subatomic particle. And they zip all around; something like forty million of them shoot through your eyeballs every second. Reading Close's book is a good introduction to a very peculiar particle, and to many allied themes in physics and cosmology. Be warned, however, that this is all so unlike the Newtonian physics and the high school chemistry with which you may be familiar that much of what Close describes is going to remain mysterious. As a tale about the hunt for the neutrino, and the tenacious researchers who lassoed the ghost, Close's brief book is a pleasing story about scientific success.

Like so many of the physics discoveries of the twentieth century, the neutrino was predicted as a theoretical particle before anyone had actually caught one, but Close writes, "The neutrino seemed to be a theorist's bad dream, a beautiful idea, destined forever to be unknowable to experiment." Physicists eventually realized that the huge numbers of neutrinos could work against the almost infinitesimal odds of catching one. What was eventually used was cleaning fluid, say 100,000 gallons of the stuff and deep in a mine to keep the detector isolated from any other influence. Neutrino detectors have gotten better. When in 1987 a supernova explosion was detected, the neutrinos were detected, too; there would have been no detectors available for them if they had passed this way a couple of decades before. We don't see such explosions very often; the most famous was in 1604. The Sun's neutrinos reach us in eight minutes; the explosion detected in1987 happened 170,000 years ago, and even at such range, the neutrinos were as numerous as the ones coming in from the Sun, an indication of the huge power in a supernova explosion.

Work is being undertaken to use detectors that will initiate the new field of neutrino astronomy; the results will supplement what light and radio telescopes are already telling us. It might be that neutrinos will be the perfect way for us to observe the center of our Milky Way, and they might provide more information about the Big Bang, dark matter, the asymmetry of the universe, and who knows what else. As up-to-date as Close's book is, the neutrino story is far from complete. Scientists got this far with inspired hunches, complicated experiments, and frustrating failures of international communication, along with surprising challenges to theories from pesky experimental results. Close's narrative is a good tale of how real science is done.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Close to perfection December 29, 2010

By Frank J. Carter

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Frank Close can explain anything and everything. And make it interesting if not downright fascinating. On the surface, neutrinos are a very technical subject that should be beyond most people's skills. Frank Close turned the search for the nuetrino into a excellent who-did-what-and-when. I highly recommend this book.