At first sight you could easily overlook this book. It’s small and succumbs to that easiest mistakes when dealing with something with a passing involvement with space of having a black cover, which almost inevitably makes a book look dull. It doesn’t cover one of the big topics of the day. Why bother? Because it’s a little cracker.

An awful lot of popular science passes across my desk, and it’s very rare that the vast majority of the content is new and fresh, but that’s the case here. Neutrinos are quantum particles that exist in vast quantities – many billions pass through your body from the Sun every second – yet they are so unlikely to interact with matter that the vast majority pass through the Earth as if it isn’t there. Once it became apparent that neutrinos ought to exist, the challenge was there to find some way of detecting them. But what a challenge.

Frank Close presents the tale of the hunt for the neutrino, and it’s a fascinating story. Apart from anything else, it’s a great example of what real science is like, with researchers in one country not aware of developments elsewhere, and huge pieces of equipment built on the erroneous assumption that protons decayed often enough to be detected then being redeployed as neutrino detectors. I particularly loved the way a scientist got an experiment past a laboratory director by playing on the director’s dislike of astrophysicists, telling him this was a chance to prove them wrong.

This really is physics in the raw – with the added benefit that we are dealing here with the weirdest detectors ever imagined. What would Galileo or Newton have made of telescopes consisting of tonnes of cleaning fluid in a cavern a mile underground? Or detectors that depend on spotting the afterglow of faster-than-light particles, again buried far beneath the Earth?

This is by no means a complete story. There is still plenty to learn about neutrinos, because even with the latest detectors, scientists are only spotting a handful a day. Yet an immense amount has been learned, both about neutrinos themselves and what they tell us about the mechanisms of stars. There is something very satisfying about someone apparently getting a theory wrong by a factor of two, only to be proved correct after 30 years study showed that neutrinos behave in a stranger fashion than anyone ever imagined.

If I’m going to be picky, there’s a ‘reprise’ section at the end that was too long to be a recap and seemed more a filler than anything – but I loved this little book and would highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in physics or astronomy.

Hardback:  

Review by Brian Clegg

I came to this book for the title. Like “Zero”, “Symmetry”, or “Shapes”, “Nothing” is one of those concepts that seems to offer an intriguing cross-cutting view of science. A few pages into the book, I thought it would deliver on the promise of the title page. But after a couple of chapters I realised that this is a book about Something, not Nothing. A few chapters later it dawned on me that the Something was actually Basic Ideas in Modern Physics. Basic Ideas in Modern Physics is an interesting topic, but not nearly as novel and mind-bending as Nothing.

It’s not Frank Close’s fault that modern physics is preoccupied with nothing-related issues: what happened at the beginning of the universe, when something turned into nothing; how the very smallest particles (or waves) behave; the geometry of space and time. And if you would like to trot through the basics of fields, waves, special and general relativity, quantum theory, the Big Bang, and the structure of the atom, then this book is just what it says on the packet: a stimulating way into new subjects. But somehow I expected more from Nothing.

What is in the book for those who have already trotted through the basics with other science writers? Some old friends reappear – the falling muon to illustrate special relativity, the pencil-on-its-point to describe symmetry breaking. But Close also takes some new angles on the old topics. In general relativity, objects tend to take the shortest route between two points. Close compares this to the tradition of “shortest path” thinking in other fields, like optics. He notes how Einstein’s equations for special relativity are the same, mathematically, as those in Lorentz’s theory of the ether. And he has a good eye for historical details. It’s one thing to say how one might lay out a theory of special relativity. But how did Einstein himself do it, using what he knew at the time? Close has the question – if not the answer – at his fingertips.

But Close’s angles are sometimes too oblique. In explaining special relativity he starts out with the common-sense notion of simultaneity, and explains how it is defeated if we assume light is constant. He then jumps to the conclusion that objects must get longer, and clocks run slower, for observers of a moving object. It’s not clear how he made the jump. We see that Lorentz’s equations are the same as Einstein’s, but it’s not clear why they are the same. His chapter on the quantum vacuum is interesting, with some striking examples of experiments that cast light on the “infinite sea” of the vacuum. But the chapter has about three different arguments for different kinds of “infinite sea”, and it is not obvious how they link up.

Perhaps it was the small font or pocket-sized format, but I found it hard to get a proper grip on this book. It is a compact brainstorm. Close asks lots of questions, but it’s not clear when each one is answered. His no-fuss prose fits a lot in, but sometimes it’s too compressed. He throws out ideas – the anthropic principle, “emergence”, multiple worlds – that look promising but fall out of sight of the reader. By turns stimulating and frustrating, Nothing leaves you wanting to find out more about Basic Ideas in Modern Physics. Which is, after all, better than finding out about nothing.

Paperback:  

Review by Michael Bycroft

I like this little book. Regular readers of my reviews will know that ‘little’ isn’t an insult – there’s nothing worse than a bloated, over-inflated popular science book. This one delivers the goods on the subject without resorting to endless padding. The subject in question is antimatter, which Frank Close covers with just enough context – particular the US Air Force’s interest in antimatter weapons, and Dan Brown’s awful antimatter-based thriller Angels and Demons – to keep the reader interested.

It’s a bit of a Brief History of Time kind of book. Before Dr Close gets all excited and waits for the royalties to come crashing in, I don’t really mean that I expect it to have the same kind of popularity of ABHoT, but rather it has the same tendency to plunge into just a bit too much depth and not necessarily to explain the science in a way that comes across well to the uninitiated. Having said that, there is some good writing here explaining why antimatter is so important and how the Big Bang could have result in mostly matter.

Even if you know a bit about antimatter, there are some surprises. And what’s lovely is the way the book really thinks about the practicalities of antimatter. You can’t store antiatoms, for instance, because they aren’t charged, so you can’t keep them in an electromagnetic container away from matter. But you can’t have billions of positrons or antiprotons in the same place either, because they repel each other. I wasn’t clear why you can’t use an anti-plasma – I wish that had been covered.

The presentation is just a touch dry – this is very obviously a book written by an academic who is trying hard to be populist but not quite making it – which is why it only gets four stars rather than five. And I don’t think he does any favours by suggesting that many people seriously think the Tunguska fireball was antimatter. But it’s a really interesting book that stretches the brain and that is packed with glowing little antimatter nuggets.

Hardback:  

Review by Brian Clegg