Scan barcode
A review by kevin_shepherd
The Neutrino Hunters - The Chase for the Ghost Particle and the Secrets of the Universe by Ray Jayawardhana
4.0
Of all the expository discoveries of theoretical physics, I find neutrinos the hardest to conceptualize. Imagine, if you can, a particle that has calculable mass and yet can pass directly through entire planets unhindered and (mostly) unaffected. Neutrinos are so elusive, so hard to detect, that scientists have placed incrediblyy expensive arrays of electronic equipment in the most inhospitable places on earth (e.g. the bottom of the ocean, beneath polar ice, etc.) just to capture minuscule traces of their passing; and yet, about 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second of every day.
The Neutrino Hunters, first published in 2014, is so well written that it should have done for theoretical and experimental physicists what “Indiana Jones” did for archeologists. It didn’t. Unfortunately for science, that was the same year Kanye West and Kim Kardashian got married. Americans, true to form, had other priorities.
“Two things are infinite, as far as we know – the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”*
___________________________________
*NOTE: that quote is commonly attributed to Albert Einstein but it was probably Fritz Perls, a German psychiatrist, who first said it.
The Neutrino Hunters, first published in 2014, is so well written that it should have done for theoretical and experimental physicists what “Indiana Jones” did for archeologists. It didn’t. Unfortunately for science, that was the same year Kanye West and Kim Kardashian got married. Americans, true to form, had other priorities.
“Two things are infinite, as far as we know – the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”*
___________________________________
*NOTE: that quote is commonly attributed to Albert Einstein but it was probably Fritz Perls, a German psychiatrist, who first said it.