The Telescope in the Ice

by Mark Bowen

  escaping Paris … Toulouse  Bonolis 2005, 489; Schecter and Schecter, 55.

  that the appearance … decent occupation  Pontecorvo 1982, 228, 230.

  technical report  Pontecorvo wrote a second report on neutrino detection in November 1946, which was declassified at the same time as the first. The second is the one that has gone down in history (Pontecorvo 1945; 1946).

  remained classified for four years  The paper’s declassification was prompted by an independent proposal of essentially the same method, which Luis Alvarez of the University of California at Berkeley published in the open literature in 1949 (Alvarez 1949; Lande 2009, 23).

  by far the best  Pontecorvo 1982, 230.

  a powerful reactor … the Sun  Ibid., 231.

  theory of energy production in stars  Bethe 1939. Hans Bethe produced an immense body of seminal work in the course of his long life. (He died in 2005 at the age of 99 and worked nearly to the end.) The citation for his Nobel Prize in Physics, which he received in 1967, recognized his entire opus up to that point while singling out this high point in particular.

  nuclear reactions … cause the sun to shine  Bahcall 1996a.

  That was indeed … lots of questions  Pontecorvo 1982, 232.

  series of discoveries  Hincks and Pontecorvo, 1948a, 1948b, 1949, 1950a, 1950b. Some of these results were confirmed by others (Pontecorvo 1982, 236n36–7).

  For people working … always been present  Pontecorvo 1982, 234.

  It made front-page news in Britain  Turchetti 2003, 410.

  foremost expert  Turchetti 2003; Turchetti 2012.

  the pressure put on him by security forces during vetting  Turchetti, 2003, 414, 414n107.

  he had defected … peaceful uses of atomic energy  Richards 1992.

  Eleven … Nobel Prizes based on Pontecorvo’s theoretical work  Frank Close (2010, 32) counts nine, and two more have been awarded since he wrote his book.

  had he lived long enough  Longevity turns out to be the basic game with the Nobel Prize, since you have to be alive to get one.

  muon neutrino was discovered in 1962  Danby et al. 1962.

  intuited … ghostlike property  Pontecorvo 1958.

  tau particle … discovered  Perl et al. 1975.

  its neutrino was finally detected  Kodama et al. 2001.

  Pontecorvo’s 1958 conjecture was proven true  Fukuda et al. 1998.

  From Poltergeist to Particle

  (This was the subtitle of Fred Reines’s 1995 Nobel lecture. The text of the talk appeared in Reviews of Modern Physics the following year [Reines 1996].)

  Ray Davis  Biographical sources for Ray Davis: Davis 2002, Lande 2009, Bahcall 1996a.

  indirect method for detecting the particle  Davis 1952.

  Davis’s stated goals  Davis 1955; Lande 2009.

  published his results in 1955  Davis 1955.

  the story of how one of the paper’s reviewers was unimpressed  Davis 2002, 61.

  Fred Reines  This biographical background, such as it is, comes from Kropp et al. 2009.

  got off to working on neutrinos  The anecdotes about Reines’s months staring at a blank pad and his decision to work with Cowan come from his Nobel lecture (1995, 1996).

  Certainly … should not work  Both letters will be found in Reines’s Nobel lecture (1995, 1996).

  first set of experiments  Cowan 1964.

  “probable” detection of the free neutrino  Reines and Cowan 1953.

  evidence would not … appear “genuine”  Cowan 1964.

  On the way down … lose him now  Barker 1979; Enz 1994, 19.

  received a tip  Reines 1995; 1996.

  detected only about three inverse beta decays per hour  Cowan et al. 1956.

  We were done … made them so  Cowan 1964.

  letter never arrived  Reines told the story of the night letter in his Nobel address (1995; 1996).

  Hoyle remarked  Hoyle 1967.

  several experiments … birth defect  Enz 1994.

  grossly overestimated the detection efficiency  Reines 1979, 16n13. (Note that this admission is conveniently obscured in a footnote.)

  snapping into line with the new theory  Reines and Cowan 1959; also Pauli 1958a.

  did nothing to defuse the controversy  I learned about this controversy from Sandip Pakvasa and John Learned. It is briefly mentioned in LANL 1997.

  a man of imposing physical stature  Kropp et al. 2009.

  talented in … oversized shoes  Ibid.; Wheeler and Ford 1998, 281.

  Bernstein refers  Bernstein 2001b, 6.

  Physicists … tampered with lightly  The quotes come from an excellent profile of Lee and Yang that Bernstein wrote for The New Yorker in 1962. Bernstein believes this might have been “the first really serious scientific article” that the magazine ever published (2001b, 6–7).

  Lee and Yang were energetic collaborators  The details in this paragraph come from Bernstein (1962).

  classic paper  Lee and Yang 1956.

  produced a definitive result, confirming Wu’s  There are a number of written accounts of these events, most of which attribute the idea of the experiment to Lederman, who appears to be a gifted self-promoter (Bernstein 1962; Close 2010; Lederman 1993, 256–73). It seems that Garwin played an equal role in conceiving the experiment and the larger role in designing the apparatus (Jerome Friedman, private communication; AIP 2001).

  Parity wasn’t just dead; it was annihilated  The papers reporting these three results all appeared in Physical Review: Wu et al. 1957; Garwin et al. 1957; Friedman and Telegdi 1957.

  front page of the New York Times  Schmeck, Jr. 1957.

  elegant experiment at Brookhaven  Goldhaber et al. 1957.

  Physicists now realize  Wilczek 2009.

  admitted to having a “mirror complex”  Meier 2001, 163 (from a long and detailed letter to Jung that Pauli wrote on August 5, 1957).

  there was not … particular subject  Ibid., 162 (letter from Pauli to Jung, August 5, 1957).

  finally proved that they did  Pauli 1955; Pauli 1958b.

  on everybody’s lips  Meier 2001, 162 (letter from Pauli to Jung, August 5, 1957).

  fixed point around which all else turned  Miller 2010, 243.

  Now, ‘mirroring’ is an archetype … engaged in something  Atmanspacher and Primas 2006, 8, 8n20.

  very impressive dream  The indented quote and Pauli’s remarks about the dream come from his August 5, 1957, letter to Jung (Meier 2001, 160–6).

  very impressed … Chinese young lady  Meier 2001, 161 (letter from Pauli to Jung, August 5, 1957).

  I do not believe … symmetric results  Bernstein 1962, 84.

  two theoretical papers by Lee and Yang  Lee et al. 1957; Lee and Yang 1957.

  Witnesses say  Enz 1973.

  I congratulate you … still persecutes me  Wu 1960; Enz 1973; Miller 2010, 240.

  very upset … quite a while  Miller 2010, 238; Meier 2001.

  Now after the first shock … right-and-left symmetric?  Pauli 1957a.

  Pauli’s last piece of scientific writing  Pauli 1958a.

  gift for her eightieth birthday  Segrè 2007, 263.

  Another of his obsessions … fine-structure constant  Indeed, Arthur I. Miller (2010) has written an entire book on Pauli’s obsession with this number.

  theoretical interpretation … atomic physics  Pauli 1948.

  the number … meaning for Pauli  Enz 1994, 23.

  Wisconsin-Style Physics

  Reines once told Francis  Halzen 2015.

  Very few … idea in writing  Reviewing the dim prehistory of deep underwater neutrino detection in his invaluable “personal history of the DUMAND project,” physicist Arthur Roberts (1992, 269–70) writes, “It seems clear that the idea of
an ocean neutrino detector had occurred to many physicists independently, though none (other than Markov) seem to have committed it to print.” Roberts does not mention Greisen, but then Greisen’s concept did not involve the deep ocean.

  diploma thesis of one Igor Zheleznykh  Zheleznykh 1958. The European diploma thesis is more-or-less equivalent to a master’s thesis in the United States.

  Zheleznykh readily admits  Zheleznykh 2006.

  Markov first presented it  Markov 1960.

  Greisen … proposed a similar idea  Greisen 1961.

  setting up Cherenkov radiation  Markov 1960.

  journal article published in January of the following year  Markov and Zheleznykh 1961.

  high-energy neutrino astronomy … radio waves  Greisen 1961.

  review article on cosmic ray showers  Greisen 1960.

  muon neutrinos … would be detected two years later  Danby et al. 1962.

  conceived by Bruno Pontecorvo in Russia before it occurred to Lederman’s team  Pontecorvo 1958; Pontecorvo 1959; Schwartz 1960.

  “plum pudding”  I got this phrase from John Learned.

  cascade  The standard physics term is shower.

  Oh-My-God particle  Wolchover 2015.

  even a neutrino  Halzen, Vazquez, et al. 1994.

  two hundred billion secondary particles and decay products  Pierre Auger Collaboration 2011.

  1960 review article  Reines 1960. This article appeared in the same issue of the Annual Review of Nuclear Science as Greisen’s classic paper.

  he began visiting … early as 1966  Learned 1991.

  “goggafangers” … “big boss bug catcher”  Kropp et al. 2009, 17.

  published their results about two weeks before Reines’s did  Achar et al. 1965; Reines et al. 1965; Reines 1967; Menon 1967; Kropp et al. 2009.

  everyone else chalked it up as a tie  In a comprehensive review of the history of neutrino astronomy, Christian Spiering (2012, 520) suggests that this was an “historic race which had no losers but two winners.”

  only 167 atmospheric neutrinos over the six years that they took data  Reines 1995, 217; Reines 1996, 324.

  small research vessel the Undula  Rossi 1985; Regener 1931.

  first baby step Learned’s thesis work eventually appeared in a journal article (Davis and Learned 1973).

  Compton had proven  Compton 1933.

  first accurate measurements of the muon’s lifetime  Rossi 1939; Rossi and Hall 1941. Rossi’s muon experiments are said to have “inaugurated the current era of particle physics” (Bonolis 2011).

  years before the latter began to produce high enough energies to be of significant use  The accelerators began to provide surprises only after 1953, when the Cosmotron, the first true high-energy accelerator, went on line at Brookhaven. This was quickly followed by the Berkeley Bevatron, where the antiproton, the antineutron, and a number of strange particles were discovered over the course of the fifties. CERN, which was conceived largely in response to cosmic ray physics, wasn’t founded until 1954.

  discovery of the pion was confirmed  Lattes, Muirhead et al. 1947; Lattes, Occhialini et al. 1947.

  One of his causes … faculty positions  AIP 1995.

  neutrino physics … Accelerator Laboratory  Galison 1983, 490.

  add more weight to his proposal  Ibid., 491.

  story of the E1A experiment is told elsewhere  Taubes 1986, chapters 1 and 2; Galison 1983.

  radical, crazy people  Taubes 1986, 13.

  once visited Rubbia … shoulder-length hair  Ibid., 18.

  on the basis of a paper  Halzen and Michael 1971.

  two most influential papers  Cline, Halzen, and Luthe 1973; Cline, Halzen, and Waldrop 1973.

  considered one of the most influential of Cline’s illustrious career  Cousins and Rosenzweig 2016.

  Peaceful Exploration by Interested Scientists Throughout the World

  “Serpents in an Astrophysical Eden”  Roberts 1992, 283; Kampa 1979. It also turns out that underwater neutrino detectors can be used to find whales. In 2005, some Italian physicists mounting an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to build a neutrino telescope named NEMO (NEutrino Mediterranean Observatory) off the coast of Sicily ran a feasibility study for an acoustic method of neutrino detection using four sensors more than two miles deep. The idea was to find out if it was quiet enough down there to “hear” neutrino interactions. As it happens, the frequency range of the expected neutrino signal overlaps those of sperm whale and dolphin calls, and, in a delightful surprise to whale experts, they discovered that hundreds of sperm whales were passing within about sixty miles of their listening post every year (AAAS 2007).

  quirky “personal history” of DUMAND  Roberts 1992. I am borrowing heavily from this paper.

  satirical songs … about physics and the academic life  In “Take Away Your Billion Dollars,” which he composed shortly after the war, Roberts bemoaned the effect of big money and military interest on the practice and teaching of physics (Haverford College 2002):

  Take away your army generals; their kiss is death, I’m sure.

  Everything I build is mine, and every volt I make is pure …

  he responded with an exposition of “jugular science”  Overbye 1998.

  Kotzer … edited its proceedings  Kotzer 1976.

  UNCLE  New Scientist 1978.

  study for communicating with the subs with neutrinos  Perry 1978.

  telecommunication with neutrino beams  Sáenz et al. 1977. Clyde Cowan worked on Cherenkov detection himself at The Catholic University of America (Überall and Cowan 1965; Cowan et al. 1966). He and Überall refer to a similar design that had been previously suggested by Keuffel (1963 and 1965).

  DUMAND … a concept, encompassing underwater and underground neutrino astronomy in all its forms  John Learned still speaks of it that way in certain contexts, and so does Igor Zheleznykh (2006).

  Roberts presented their first thoughts  Roberts et al. 1977.

  UNDINE  Undines are elemental or mythic beings, usually female, associated with water. A mermaid would be one example. They first appear in the writings of Paracelsus, the medieval alchemist.

  Adherents began to gather  Roberts 1992, 308.

  UNDINE was returned … other suitors  Ibid., 274.

  offered “several thousand phototubes for DUMAND”  Ibid., 308.

  Russians already had … Pontecorvo and Davis  INR 1997.

  Rubbia went out of his way … Nobel lecture  Rubbia 1984.

  more interested in supersymmetry than in the particles they ended up finding  Taubes 1986.

  contributing a theory paper  Halzen 1981.

  DUMAND symposium  Stenger 1981.

  the severing of the Russian link … available for us  Roberts 1992, 275n2.

  Science at Its Best

  glass sphere capable of withstanding at least 500 times atmospheric pressure  Ibid., 261.

  oceanographers were amazed … order of 100  Ibid., 278.

  snap loading  Ibid., 280.

  the explosive bolts … failed to release when fired  Ibid., 272.

  They took a total … muons’ angular distribution  Babson et al. 1990.

  The Russians proceeded methodically  The information on Baikal’s progress comes from Spiering (2012) and the Baikal Collaboration (1992).

  monopole, first postulated by Dirac  Dirac 1931.

  proposed one of the first credible theories of grand unification  Georgi and Glashow 1974.

  Pauli employed group theory  Pauli 1955.

  diamonds might not be forever  Robinson 1979.

  theory had been used to estimate the proton’s lifetime  Goldman and Ross 1979.

  listening for a gnat’s whisper in a hurricane  LANL 1997.

  Glashow pronounced the experime
nt “an unmitigated failure”  Taubes 1986, 160.

  IMB “had some candidates, but they weren’t elected”  Bernstein 2001b, 79.

  there’s a Hyper-K in the offing  Normile 2015.

  Supernova 1987a  The a designates this as the first supernova to be observed that year. Twelve others were observed in 1987, but they were all much dimmer and seen only through telescopes.

  The following night … no star before  Simonsen 2009.

  Duhalde had taken … knew it well  Schorn 1987b, 470.

  When McNaught developed the negative, the supernova was there  I pieced together the story of the optical detection of Supernova 1987a with the help of Shorn (1987a, b, and c), Woosley and Phillips (1988), Sutton (1992, 184–6), Bernstein (2001, 64–66), Simonsen (2009), and Kirshner (2002).

  the swift rise to brilliance  Schorn 1987b, 471.

  constrained the current theoretical models  Ibid., 755.

  Especially during … last even longer  Woosley and Phillips 1988, 751.

  A six-second flash … Neutrino Observatory in the Caucasus  Baksan detection: Alekseev et al. 1987 and 1988; Chudakov et al. 1987. Although I have been focusing on Cherenkov detectors, the 1980s saw a rush to build other types of neutrino detector as well. The Liquid Scintillation Detector (LSD), built in a tunnel under Mont Blanc by a Swiss-Italian team, detected a flash of what seemed to be neutrinos about five hours before IMB and Kamiokande detected theirs. IMB and Kamiokande did not see the LSD flash (double entendre intended), and LSD did not see theirs. The LSD signal seemed real (don’t they all?); and, in fact, the LSD collaboration was the first to claim they had detected neutrinos from the supernova; but their claim is now seen as a false alarm. It created much confusion early on and people still argue about it, but it is now generally believed that LSD experienced a very unlucky fluctuation.

  Michigan folks … at a ski resort in France  Kirshner 2002, 43.

  IMB announced … after Kamiokande did  Kirshner 2004.

  two collaborations published back-to-back papers  IMB: Bionta et al. 1987; Kamiokande: Hirata et al. 1987 and 1988. (Both instruments had been updated by this time. They were now known as IMB-II and Kamiokande-II.)

  When all is said and done … most violent events in the universe  Woosley and Phillips 1988, 754.