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THE noble gases don’t sound that exciting, and they barely feature in daily life other than in helium balloons and neon lights. Even so, David Fisher has written an amusing book about them, with a little sex, some academics behaving badly and lots of great science.

Fisher, recently retired after a lifetime in cosmochemistry, delves into these gases and their uses as he chronicles his own career. Alongside tales of grim winters in Ithaca, New York, and spilling acid on himself, he covers argon’s role in dating ocean sediments and the discovery that xenon is a splendid anaesthetic.

One of the longest chapters tells how his colleague Raymond Davis won the Nobel prize for counting argon atoms down in a mine, so detecting neutrinos from nuclear fusion inside the sun. It was work that Fisher did not have the patience to do, though in writing about it he gives us a warts-and-all look at how science is actually done.