Upon reading the title of this book, you might be tempted to judge it as too technical or perhaps too arcane to be of interest. If so, you would be missing out on a compelling narrative about an exceptional man and his lifelong quest to do something great. Chasing the Ghost – Nobelist Fred Reines and the Neutrino by Leonard A. Cole has just enough physics to interest and motivate the reader, while keeping the focus on the trials and triumphs in Fred Reines unique life. As Fred’s younger cousin, author Cole supplements his family knowledge of the early years with interviews of many prominent and influential physicists who knew Fred personally.
Our world is essentially made of four elementary particles – up and down quarks, electrons, and neutrinos. The latter is the ghost being chased, a particle that passes through the earth as if it were not even there and is extremely difficult (some physicists thought impossible) to detect. A thousand trillion neutrinos pass harmlessly through your body every second, and many of these were created shortly after the universe was born. Fred Reines called them “the most tiny quantity of reality ever imagined by a human being.” With that brief introduction to the neutrino, you cannot help but want to know more about the man who devoted the bulk of his professional life to finding and studying them.
Finding the neutrino was not just about arguing with colleagues at a blackboard covered with complicated equations, it was an adventure involving extreme hardship that covered the globe. Although neutrinos are abundant, so are the cosmic rays that hide their tiny signal. One solution was to go underground, where those rays could not penetrate. From the first detector built by Fred Reines and his colleague Clyde Cowan to the Hyper-Kamiokande equipment currently under construction in Japan, neutrino projects have grown to a staggering scale. The money required, the size of the equipment, the global locations, and the speculative nature of the search all were daunting. Fred Reines had an imposing, self-assured presence which surely helped him to advance such an overwhelming project. <continue>
