Complex Numbers

Singing Neutrinos

Nothing profound or, hopefully, controversial today; mostly just a lesson in how not to write a headline.

And maybe some physics... but no math, so don't run away just yet.

The singing neutrino Nobel laureate who nearly bombed Nevada  
From desert to gold mine — Frederick Reines was a larger-than-life physicist who did larger-than-life experiments.

I mean, neutrinos sing? I admit I'm not up on all the latest advances in physics, but I didn't know we taught them to- oh. It's the scientist who sang.

Article is a book review, but also functions as a summary of the guy's bio. I shouldn't have to mention once again that I don't automatically shy away from book-shilling articles here on a writing site, but I just did anyway.

In the early 1950s, the physicist Frederick Reines and his colleague Clyde Cowan designed an experiment to detect neutrinos

From what I've read about physics, this was a Big Deal. Theoretical physicists can come up with all sorts of hypotheses, but it takes experimental physicists to support (or disprove) them. Very few physicists delve into both.

The experiment was to take place in the Nevada desert. A flux of neutrinos would be created by detonating a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb

I can see the grant proposal now. "First, we build an atom bomb..."

At the last minute, Reines and Cowan transferred the experiment to a nuclear reactor

Aw.

It's implied that the bomb went boom anyway, as they were wont to do back in the 1950s. However, I seriously doubt that "at the last minute" should be taken literally.

The neutrino-research community has mushroomed over the decades

It's always amusing to see a pun, intended or not, in articles like this one.

The article then goes into the aforementioned summary of Reines' life.

Neutrinos were nicknamed ghost particles because of their uncanny properties.

Turns out they're even weirder than scientists first thought, but that's another topic. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if, as with the "God Particle" (the Higgs boson) decades later, the media didn't latch on to this and create the entirely wrong impression.

But with no charge and a vanishingly small mass, they can be detected only indirectly, when they interact with another particle.

Okay, but technically, that's the only way to detect anything.

As Cole describes, Reines and Cowan began what they named Project Poltergeist at a plutonium-producing reactor in Hanford, Washington.

Project Poltergeist, plutonium-producing... come on, there have to have been more opportunities for alliteration in there.

Reines left Los Alamos in 1959 for the Case Institute in Cleveland, Ohio. Seven years later, he moved to the University of California, Irvine.

Note how there is nothing reported for Reines during his time in Cleveland. I like to think that this is because nothing good ever happens in Cleveland.

Anyway, like I said, nothing of tremendous import to most people, and this is more of an example of science book review writing than anything else. But there were enough little amusing things to make me want to include it here.