The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the UniverseBy Ray JayawardhanaNarrated by Bronson Pinchot
Length6h 3m
About this audiobook
Detective thriller meets astrophysics in this adventure into neutrinos and the scientists who pursue them.
For more than eighty years, brilliant and eccentric scientists around the world have been searching for the incredibly small bits of matter we call neutrinos. Trillions of these ghostly particles pass through our bodies every second, but they are so pathologically shy that neutrino hunters have to use Olympic-size pools deep underground and a gigantic cube of Antarctic ice to catch just a handful. Neutrinos may hold the secrets to the nature of antimatter and what the universe was like just seconds after the big bang, but they are extremely elusive and difficult to pin down—much like the adventurous scientists who doggedly pursue them.
In Neutrino Hunters, renowned astrophysicist and award-winning author Ray Jayawardhana takes us on a thrilling journey into the shadowy world of neutrinos and the colorful lives of those who chase them. Demystifying particle science along the way, Jayawardhana tells a detective story with cosmic implications—interweaving the tales of the irascible Casanova Wolfgang Pauli; the troubled genius Ettore Majorana, who disappeared without a trace; and Bruno Pontecorvo, whose defection to the Soviet Union caused a Cold War ruckus. Ultimately, Jayawardhana reveals just how significant these fast-moving particles are to the world we live in and why the next decade of neutrino hunting will redefine how we think about physics, cosmology, and our lives on Earth.
Ray Jayawardhana is a professor and Canada
research chair in observational astrophysics at the University of Toronto,
where he also serves as senior advisor to the president on science engagement.
His writing has appeared in the New
York Times, the Economist, Scientific
American, Astronomy, Muse,
and more. He is the author of Strange New Worlds, which was a
finalist for the Lane Anderson Award, one of Library Journal’s best science books of 2011, and
the basis of the CBC television documentary The
Planet Hunters. He lives in Toronto.View all by Ray Jayawardhana
