Leonard A. Cole. Chasing the Ghost. World Scientific, 2021.
Chasing the Ghost has nothing to do with Ghostbusters. It is a biography of Nobel Prize winner Fred Reines (Ray-ness) who helped discover the neutrino. The book is the man’s life story, so the actual neutrino work which made him famous happens about a third of the way through the book.
The author is a cousin of Dr. Reines. He has some personal memories plus access to much family material. Dr. Reines’ parents came from Eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century to avoid pogroms. Dr. Reines was enamored of science from an early age. The existence of the neutrino was hypothesized in the 1930s, but there was no way to prove its existence. When he heard about this hypothetical subatomic particle, he decided that he would be the one to discover it.
Before making that discovery in 1954, he worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos and witnessed the first detonation of the Atomic Bomb in 1945. One interesting detail the author notes is that contrary to popular legend, J. Robert Oppenheimer did not quote from the Bhagavad-Gita. He simply said, “It worked.” Most of the witnesses were simply in awe of the power of the bomb.
Dr. Reines would join Clyde Cowan at the Savannah River nuclear reactor in South Carolina where they devised a project that would detect the neutrino from atomic fission. Eventually, the experiment worked. The challenge was to screen out other particles that had a similar signature.
Dr. Reines would then go on to do greater experiments with neutrinos. Neutrinos are particles that travel at the speed of light and pass through matter. They appear throughout space, and some estimate that millions pass through our bodies every second. They can pass through the earth without stopping unless they strike another subatomic particle. So to detect neutrinos in nature, the challenge is to find a place where neutrinos would still be passing by but the various cosmic rays would have been stopped. So Dr. Reines would do a lot of work underground in deep mines where only neutrinos would still be on the loose.
The cover of the book shows one such deep detector created in Japan. It has thousands of electronic tubes for detection surrounded by pure water. The picture looks like a tiny rubber raft floating in a strange hall of mirrors.
One concept I had not heard of before reading this book was that of pathological technology. By that was meant a belief or plan that would be proven to be based on false information or a false premise. The example the book used was a plan by some people who worked on the Manhattan project to create a space ship that instead of being propelled by rocket fuel gases would be propelled by a series of small, controlled atomic blasts.
I have elsewhere expressed some skepticism about the existence of dark matter and of macroevolution. Are those pathological theories? Cole notes that if neutrinos can be shown to have mass, that could account for much of the mathematical variations which made astrophysicists hypothesize dark matter. If there are countless quadrillions of these all over the universe and they do have some mass, that could help solve the problem. We shall see. For the moment, a former science teacher friend tells me, “Dark matter is simply a fudge factor to make the math work.”
Dr. Reines eventually received the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the neutrino (literally, “tiny neutral thing”) in 1995. Alas, his partner Dr. Cowan had already died and Nobels only go to living people. No doubt, if he were still alive, he would have been named as well.
Chasing the Ghost provides character sketches of many famous physicists. It shows how so many of the nuclear physicists cooperated and worked together. We meet, mostly through Reines, many of them from Enrico Fermi and Wolfgang Pauli to Richard Feynman and Douglas Hofstader (author of Gödel, Escher, Bach). We meet many larger than life figures working on larger than life experiments. Still, they come across as real people.
One interesting aside was that in the 1970s there was a movement to transport Ethiopian Jews to Israel. Ethiopia had been taken over by Communists and there was a famine. Ethiopian Jews were threatened by both, but the Israeli government was unsure if it should get involved, having just gotten over a couple of recent wars. About 50,000 American Jews signed a petition to encourage Israel to take action. The organizers deliberately put Reines’ name at the top.
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin did not know who Fred Reines was, but he recognized the family name. Isaac Jacob Reines was a famous rabbi who back in 1906 had co-written a tract supporting the Ethiopian Jews. The rabbi was Dr. Reines’ great uncle.
There might be one minor problem with the book. Because there is so much science and because so many different scientists and laboratories and schools are named, an index could have helped. I understand that biographies are usually simple stories, but there is so much to this one that readers (like me anyhow) might actually use an index.
Chasing the Ghost contributes to the layman’s understanding of subatomic particles and nuclear physics, and how people who study those things work. For that alone, the book is worth reading.