COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS

The IceCube Laboratory at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station.

ASTROPHYSICS Chasing ghosts in Antarctica Alexandra Witze welcomes a history of IceCube, an ambitious neutrino observatory.

ark Bowen, a physicist-turned- Francis Halzen, it had idea of an electrically neutral, nearly mass- writer, sets his sights high in The 86 strings studded less particle emitted during β radio­active Telescope in the Ice, the history of throughout a cubic decay. In 1956, physicists Clyde Cowan Ma detector buried in Antarctic ice since the kilometre of ice. and Frederick Reines reported measuring 1990s. The IceCube observatory is designed Bowen has been about three neutrinos per hour coming to do the near-impossible: track neutrinos. embedded in this pro- from a nuclear reactor in South Carolina. These tiny particles whiz through the Uni- ject since 1998. Dur- Bowen sketches these and other discoveries

verse in staggeringly huge numbers while ing those decades, he while noting some of the scientists’ personal FELIPE PEDREROS, ICECUBE/NSF hardly ever interacting with matter; billions has had access to team quirks, such as Pauli’s tendency to party and upon billions are passing through your body The Telescope in meetings and other Reines’s aggressiveness in staking claims. right now. the Ice: Inventing a insider information, By 1960, physicists including Moisei New Astronomy at IceCube and its predecessor, the Ant- the South Pole much as sociologist Markov and Kenneth Greisen were begin- arctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array MARK BOWEN Harry Collins has with ning to dream up ways to capture the fleet- (AMANDA), are international collabora- St. Martin’s: 2017. researchers hunting ing particles. Markov’s contribution was tions led by the University of Wisconsin– gravitational waves the plum-pudding model, in which detec- Madison (UW–Madison) and located at at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational- tors are embedded in a 3D grid. When a the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station. Wave Observatory (LIGO; see Nature 542, neutrino interacts with the surrounding Their detectors, arrays of optical modules 28–29; 2017). Both observatories use expen- material, it generates another particle, a on strings, are sunk into the ice sheet. The sive, technologically challenging machines muon. The muon rushes on in the general AMANDA group coalesced at a cosmic-ray to answer profound physics questions. direction in which the neutrino had been meeting in 1990. By 1994, it had installed Whereas Collins spun erudite, sociologically going, creating pale- 4 strings; by 2000, that had grown to 19. distanced tales, Bowen comes off as more of blue radiation. By NATURE.COM IceCube, established in 2005, began add- a booster. capturing and analys- For more on science ing more. By the time it had finished con- The Telescope in the Ice begins with a brisk ing the tracks of blue in culture see: struction 6 years later, pushed through by history of neutrinos. In 1930, the theoreti- light, physicists hope nature.com/ supporters including principal investigator cal physicist Wolfgang Pauli put forward the to recreate the path booksandarts

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BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT

and energy of the neutrino. The detector, however, must have immense amounts of shielding to screen out the confounding Books in brief effects of cosmic rays. Some observatories are buried deep in rock; for the team that The Zoomable Universe would create AMANDA and IceCube, that Caleb Scharf and Ron Miller Scientific American (2017) screening meant Antarctic ice. In 1977, designers Charles and Ray Eames harnessed camera zoom Bowen’s involvement began in 1997, when and graphics to play with cosmic scale. The result: iconic film Powers he encountered ice driller Bruce Koci while of Ten. Forty years on, after vast advances in astrophysics, the quantum reporting on efforts to acquire ice cores and the subatomic, physicist Caleb Scharf revisits the territory. from mountain glaciers. In the off season, Zooming from the observable Universe (29 billion parsecs across) to Koci worked for AMANDA, decamping nearly nothing (10−35 metres), Scharf’s vivid writing meets its match to the South Pole to drill and melt the long in Ron Miller’s mind-bending illustrations. A total delight, evoking the boreholes needed to take the detector-laden Milky Way as “ringmaster” to a Galactic swarm and musing at the strings — the plums in the pudding. Koci jiggling weirdness of quantum foam near the Planck scale. had to invent new methods for solving issues such as how to keep the huge tanks of water hot, and maintain the flow. In the first Leonardo da Vinci season, 1991–92, the team lost the drill. It Walter Isaacson Simon & Schuster (2017) also became apparent that there were more Leonardo da Vinci’s prowess as a polymath — driven by insatiable bubbles in the ice than expected, which curiosity about everything from the human womb to deadly interfered with the detectors’ ability to cap- weaponry — still stuns. In this copiously illustrated biography, we ture the faint glow from travelling muons. feel its force all over again. Walter Isaacson wonderfully conveys how That meant going even deeper into the ice — Leonardo’s genius unified science and art. His grasp of the skull’s and the birth of IceCube. Its detectors start structure, for instance, fed the exquisite modelling of his portraits. about 1.5 kilometres below the surface. But the prime focus here is the notebooks — glorious mash-ups The Telescope in the Ice acknowledges the mixing to-do lists, bravura drawings of human musculature, oddly many external factors that can help a large random questions and 169 formulae for squaring a circle. scientific project to completion. The fortunes of IceCube (which cost a cool US$279 mil- lion to build) were bolstered, for instance, Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity by an influential 1997 report chaired by Sandra Postel Island (2017) aerospace executive Norman Augustine; Dams, levees, canals: humanity’s battle with water is age-old. Yet this stressed the importance of international droughts and flooding cost billions, as the planet is lashed by extreme cooperation at the pole, with a subtext of weather and climate change and our lifestyles lap up gargantuan maintaining US dominance in Antarctic volumes of H2O. Sandra Postel’s superb study demonstrates how research. In 2000, when the Lawrence Berke- working with wetlands and watersheds can turn that tide. Postel, ley Laboratory in California proposed itself director of the Global Water Policy Project, cites scores of sustainable as lead institution for IceCube, the Wiscon- wins, from permeable pavements that control storm water in Kansas sin contingent tussled with George Smoot, City, Missouri, to groundwater replenishment in rural Rajasthan, India, a future Nobel laureate who wanted to take kick-started by conservationist Rajendra Singh. over as principal investigator. (He failed.) And a well-timed 2002 visit to a White House office by the UW–Madison group, including Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery Halzen, helped to override the reluctance of Scott Kelly Knopf (2017) National Science Foundation (NSF) direc- Biographies by US astronauts are booming, and what’s most tor Rita Colwell. Bowen covers every twist notable is how distinct the personalities are under the “right stuff” and turn of the budgetary debates, techno- label. Scott Kelly, who spent almost a year aboard the International logical challenges and scientific scepticism, Space Station in 2015–16, is a markedly down-to-earth high-flyer. A including the occasional much-needed loan “blue-collar New Jersey” boy, Kelly grew up with an alcoholic father, from UW–Madison when the NSF could not discovering the joys of study in time to ensure that he became a cough up enough funding. pilot and, finally, astronaut. The details grip, from the hideously From AMANDA — a telescope no one complex simulated missions to the 400 experiments he conducted was sure would work — to IceCube, the on board and the insights he developed in his annus mirabilis. ‘Fellowship of the Cube’ managed to real- ize its dream of detecting neutrinos in 2011. Today, IceCube spots about 100,000 atmos- Animals Strike Curious Poses pheric neutrinos a year. In 2013, it reported Elena Passarello Jonathan Cape (2017) the first very-high-energy neutrinos coming Animals, so often bit players in human history, can gain star status. from outside the Solar System, and each day Thus, the starling whose song reputedly inspired Wolfgang Amadeus it sweeps up more and more data, fulfilling Mozart; or Arabella, a web-weaving cross spider studied on NASA’s Halzen’s vision. From his spot within the space station Skylab. In 16 powerful, impressionistic essays, Elena fellowship, Bowen does justice to its story. ■ Passarello gathers a multitude of these close encounters. From the “near-bestiary” roving ancient Europe to the brave new world of Alexandra Witze is a correspondent for rewilding, she brilliantly explores the conflicts and cruelties inherent Nature in Boulder, Colorado. in our fascination with animal otherness. Barbara Kiser

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