One sunny November day when I was an undergraduate, a classmate of mine turned up to a quantum-mechanics lecture wearing an enormous pair of thick, black boots. He had been offered the chance to do PhD research in Antarctica, he explained, so was graduating early in order to start before the brief southern summer ended. Oh yes, and his expedition boots had arrived that morning. Pretty cool, huh?

I was insanely jealous – although not, it must be said, jealous enough to apply to a similar PhD programme. A few years later, while working in the snug confines of an English atomic-physics lab, I felt a related pang of envy after talking to an astronomer who had just returned from observations in Namibia. Clearly, some people have all the fun. But my latest attack of jealousy is the worst ever, and I blame Anil Ananthaswamy for it. Or, rather, I blame his book The Edge of Physics: Dispatches From the Frontiers of Cosmology – which is, quite simply, the ultimate physics-adventure travelogue.

Popular-science books about cosmology tend to be long on ideas and short on means of testing them. Their subject matter is, of course, partly to blame. As the theoretical physicist Ruth Gregory noted in these pages a year ago, when it comes to the universe, “we cannot be independent external observers, and we can hardly run the experiment again!”. Yet recent years have seen the development of a new generation of experiments that promise to test, if not the universe itself, then at least some of our theories about it. A number of publications (including Physics World) have already covered these advances for a specialized audience. However, the experimental-cosmology story has been crying out for a good popular treatment too – and, for the most part, Ananthaswamy delivers it.

A London-based science journalist with a background in engineering, Ananthaswamy set out to tell this story by visiting a handful of facilities and talking to the people who work there. The book begins at one of astronomy’s most iconic locations: California’s Mount Wilson Observatory. There, in the late 1920s, Edwin Hubble discovered that light from distant galaxies was more red-shifted than light from galaxies nearby – a sign that the universe is expanding. After a short sojourn in Hubble’s monkish retreat (now mostly used for public-outreach events), Ananthaswamy travels to a wide range of exotic locales. These include Lake Baikal, Russia, home of the Baikal Deep Underwater Neutrino Telescope; Cerro Paranal Observatory, Chile, site of some of the world’s largest visible and infrared telescopes; the MeerKAT radio-telescope array in South Africa’s Karoo desert; and the IceCube neutrino telescope in Antarctica.

There are a handful of more accessible stopovers as well, such as CERN and Minnesota’s Soudan Mine, where members of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) team are working more than half a mile below the Earth’s surface on an experiment designed to detect dark matter. After setting such a peripatetic precedent in the first part of the book, it is almost surprising that Ananthaswamy neglects to visit the facilities he describes in the final chapter. However, given that the Herschel and Planck observatories are currently orbiting the Earth at a distance of 1.5 million kilometres, the omission is, perhaps, understandable.

The fact that there are scientists – and not just biologists but physicists and astronomers too – who will literally trek to the ends of the Earth for their research is an inspiration for many. It is also an important link to the “heroic age” of scientific exploration, and to the brave individuals who hauled samples from the South Pole and collected rocks from the Moon. Yet for the most part, Ananthaswamy’s descriptions of the people he meets tend more towards “quirky” than “lionizing”. Thus we learn that CDMS team member Richard Gaitskell wears pink socks, and that two of the Lake Baikal physicists, Vasily Prosin and Leonid Kuzmichov, share the author’s passion for Bollywood cinema.

Some readers will, no doubt, find such details a distraction. Yet for those whose curiosity extends not just to the research itself, but also to what it is like for the people who do it, Ananthaswamy’s tales of science on icebergs and in deserts are a real treat. It is also refreshing to read that he spent significant chunks of time talking to the technicians and postgraduate students who pour sweat, tears and sometimes blood into each project, not just to those higher up the chain. The result is an account stuffed with the kind of stories that experimentalists relish – like the difficulty of finding 18th-century lead for dark-matter detector shields (needed because old lead is less radioactive than newly mined stuff), and the fact that, because bizarre names are more memorable than serial numbers, somewhere under the Antarctic ice is a neutrino detector called Salmonella.

So, as an adventure story and a fly-on-the-wall account of remote places that most of us will never visit, The Edge of Physics is brilliant. The scientific explanations that encompass each anecdote are clear and coherent, and Ananthaswamy excels at weaving together historical information, pithy quotes from scientists and vivid descriptions of what each site is like. There is one problem, though, and it lies in the author’s efforts to fashion his travels into something more than a round-the-world jolly. In the final two chapters, Ananthaswamy moves away from experiments and onto a discussion of string theory and the multiverse. These are both fascinating topics, and I can appreciate the appeal of tying everything together with a neat, theoretical bow. But unlike neutrinos or even dark matter, the experiments in this book will never detect strings, and other universes will almost certainly prove impossible to detect, even in principle.

In a book that addresses a lot of big topics, enough should have been as good as a feast. Still, it would be churlish to protest too much about The Edge of Physics. Ananthaswamy has uncovered some intriguing stories and told them well, and his book goes some way towards redressing the theory/experiment imbalance in the popular-physics literature. Plus, having read how much he missed the simple smell of damp earth after just a few days at the South Pole, I no longer envy my former classmate who spent three months there. At least, not as much.