Thirty-eight years, a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, and the universe's ghost particles

In 1988, physicist Francis Halzen proposed something that sounded like a fever dream: turn a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice into a giant eye for catching neutrinos — ghostly particles that stream through the universe barely touching anything. On Tuesday he won the 2026 Nobel Prize in physics for pulling it off. Halzen rallied more than 450 scientists from 58 institutions in 14 countries to bury thousands of light sensors two kilometers deep in South Pole ice. The IceCube observatory switched on in 2010 and caught its first ultra-rare cosmic neutrinos in 2013; it later traced one particle to a distant blazar and found neutrinos coming from our own Milky Way. 'When we started this project, very few thought it would work — including myself,' Halzen said by phone. 'It was kind of an adventure where success was not guaranteed, and we were lucky to overcome the various challenges.'