He spent 39 years being told his idea was crazy — then won the Nobel for seeing the universe without light

Francis Halzen, 82, the Belgian-American physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, won the Nobel for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory: 5,160 light sensors on 86 cables frozen into a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice, completed in 2011, which detected the first cosmic high-energy neutrinos in 2013. He first proposed using Antarctic ice in 1988. A sole laureate — rare in modern physics. The prize is 12 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million).