John Gribbin
Small Is Beautiful
Of all the particles detected so far by physicists, neutrinos are the most difficult to find. This is not because they are rare – far from it. Billions of neutrinos produced in nuclear reactions deep inside the sun pass through each square centimetre of your skin every second. But that’s the trouble: they pass through just about everything. In 1930 the physicist Wolfgang Pauli postulated the existence of neutrinos to explain anomalous features of nuclear interactions and was so confident that they would never be detected directly that he promised a case of champagne to anyone who could do the trick. In 1956, when neutrinos were indeed detected, he made good his promise.
The story of how the trick was done lies at the heart of Frank Close’s enjoyable little account of one of the longest-running sagas in twentieth-century physics. The key was the realisation that while the chance of a single neutrino being detected by its interaction with an atom
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'As it starts to infect your dreams, you realise that "Portal 2" is really an allegory of the imaginative leap: the way in which we traverse the space between distant concepts, via the secret conduits we place within them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony
'Any story about Eden has to be a story about the Fall; unchanging serenity does not make a narrative.'
@suzifeay reviews Jim Crace's 'eden'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trouble-in-paradise
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf