Mechanism is via conversion of neutrinos into charged particles which are then detected via Cherenkov radiation which is produced when a charged particle moves with speeds larger then the speed of light in the medium. (That is only possible because it is less than the speed of light in vacuum which cannot be exceeded.)
This is quite nuanced and not as most people assume.
It is the "phase velocity of light in that medium" that is exceeded.
phase velocity of light in a medium = speed of light / refractive index of the medium.
Thus the EM wave is slowed down in a medium and so a charged particle can exceed it producing Cherenkov radiation. This is similar to a sonic boom in atmosphere when speed of sound is exceeded. In both cases the object is traveling faster than the wavefront.
It is only in vacuum that "phase velocity of light" = "group velocity of light" = c (i.e. 300,000 km/sec)
If anyone was wondering how some of that heavy stuff gets to the south pole to build such a large engineering project, at the farthest possible end of any logistics chain:
It would probably be harder if they wanted to put it, for instance, on the ocean floor at Point Nemo, but for sure the literal south pole is pretty damn expensive on a $ per kg to get stuff sent to. And on an ongoing basis to sustain operations 24x7x365 (it's my understanding it runs almost entirely on diesel fuel and/or Jet-A for a big-ass set of generators).
For sure, there are more difficult places, but I don’t think there is any conceivable place where the supply chain runs through the South Pole on its way. I hope not.
I disagree: anywhere in the ocean is easier logistics than crawler trains over land: ship it there and chuck it overboard. They do that to install oil rigs all the time (but that's more like float it there and sink it). Eg: https://www.wired.com/2014/07/dockwise-vanguard-shipping
Yeah, but now imagine the cost of putting large active electronics 4,000 meters down on the sea floor and keeping it running, and getting the data back off it... The cost of running the drill rig seen in the photos of the icecube detector would be a fraction of that.
There's a weird overlap in engineering and physics disciplines between the hard engineering/business practices of the mining industry, and particle physics.
Right, but for those they need to make/move/collect a large amount of transparent material, like heavy water etc for the particles to interact with. But they get that 'for free' with the ice.
The best science comes from areas that have no obvious use. The original insights into nuclear physics, quantum physics and relativity were all pure thought experiments. They led to the world we live in.
I'm personally very happy that we're still funding science that isn't obviously monetised.
The reason for Antarctica is that it's the only place you find cubic kilometres of stable ice that doesn't drift around.
1: Ice-mass that isn't contaminated by atomic testing fallout (if the ice has been there since the 40s it's without radioactive waste (faschinating to read about how WW2 wrecks is a prime resource of steel since it's a huge amount of steel without trace amounts of radionucletiods from testing fallout).
2: No current interference (nuclear power, radiowaves,etc) creating possible test uncertainties.
3: I'm sure there are other reasons
The negative naturally is cost, but since the expriment succeeded it will probably be useful for any attempts to send robots or even humanity into space beyond the solar system.
Neutrinos need a large detector volume for efficiency because they interact so rarely. You can’t detect them directly so you need a transparent medium to detect their collision byproducts. Good detector mediums are water and ice, and are underground to minimise background light. There are relatively few places you can do this. Mine caverns and under the sea are the most common, but marine detectors are notoriously hard to build. Francis Halzen proposed using ice. At the Pole, the glacial plateau is 2 miles high and the breakthrough was confirming that the ice is in fact highly transparent if you go deep enough.
Why the pole specifically? You could probably build a second IceCube 100 miles away, but how are you going to get that materials there? Pole has a skiway for large aircraft and infrastructure to house a large number of people. The traverse (SPoT) only became operational near the end of construction - the initial holes were drilled in 2005 and almost everything had to be flown in.
Telescope In The Ice does a great job of explaining the history and science behind the experiment.
> which are then detected via Cherenkov radiation which is produced when a charged particle moves with speeds larger then the speed of light in the medium. (That is only possible because it is less than the speed of light in vacuum which cannot be exceeded.)
I have been researching applications of FTL as well;
Where is there an actual vacuum on Earth or in microgravity? So, there are Proca waves within dielectric Proca metamaterials and plasmas and waveguides; and photons can have effective mass and/or longitudinal charge Ez in ionized plasma?
So, Maxwellian waves with no longitudinal (Ez,) component can exist in what fraction of the universe if they can only exist in a vacuum?
I appreciate the boldness of this project, it has an element of sci-fi to it. Building a base at the south pole to bury sensors in ice to measure elusive particles. The stuff of dreams!
To be fair, the base was already there and logistically essential. The IceCube topside building is just a part of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, about a km or so from the Elevated Station.
This image* from Wikipedia surprised me. The topside building is...you could say...the tip of the iceberg. The detectors span a huge area going over 2km deep. The predecessor AMANDA array was also down there.
The building is just for housing the data gathering and comms equipment and whatever maintenance and engineering stuff the array needs. I don’t think anybody physically works there regularly.
What an amazing accomplishment! I played a very tiny part in this project and went to the South Pole in 2009 to help with construction. Didn't see any neutrinos the entire time I was there though :/
I worked with a guy who worked on IceCube. He flew down to the South Pole, went all the way to the station, just to install debian for their data processing systems. I was... a bit jealous.
We think of receiving a Nobel Prize as something super rare and exceptional and it is. What still always astounds me though, is this:
There are nearly 300 living laureates. Enough to hold a yearly meetup for them in Lindau, where usually about 40 gather. This year, for the event's 75th anniversary, there were even about 70. Imagine that.
IIRC Oppenheimer facilitated / sponsored a meeting there after the Manhattan Project, as a gathering where physicists could talk freely about physics for a change.
I wonder - was there really no other people they could have given it to? The detection of gravitational waves was split between a theorist, experimentalist and a person who had a big hand in shepherding the project along. Could not the same have been done here?
I would imagine the problem is that there are too many of them.
For better or worse the prize can only go to 3 people. Over the years there are generally many dozens of people who make absolutely critical contributions to these kinds of experiments. In this case, though, the same guy was listed as the PI of the UW Madison group, and Madison is very clearly "the" operator of the project.
Halzen is by any measure an awesome physicist, but he's also a good "fit" for the Nobel because of this unique situation.
I was in the IceCube experiment for a bit as well as the ATLAS Experiment at CERN. So you could say I contributed a bit to both this and the Higgs Nobel. Being part of these big collaborations, you know what the deal is. The Nobel is excellent PR for physics, and science in general, but it is just a prize. Francis is the singular leader of IceCube, and a visionary in the area, it is perfectly fair to award it to him, if not to the total collaboration.
As for theory, I don’t think this award hinges on theoretical predictions but the enablement of observation itself.
All of science is collaborative and this is especially true in these big experiments: the IceCube collaboration is over 400 people [1] from several dozen institutes. There are a lot of experiments where giving a Nobel prize would be impossible because there's no "principal investigator" for the experiment.
Well holy shit. I didn't expect to wake up this morning and see the "outside" guy from my thesis committee (aka, the only one who wasn't a rubber stamp) winning the Nobel Prize.
Francis isn't the first Nobel Prize winner I've crossed paths with. But I think he's the only one I'd call a "decent human being". (When I use it, that phrase has a meaning roughly comparable to "nontrivial", so, saying it is nontrivial.) He was well enough liked by faculty and students during my time at UW-Madison.
It's important to note that he's not getting the prize for "conceiving of IceCube" like some people are saying. It's for "conceiving of IceCube and somehow actually making it happen". The latter is the achievement.
I had a professor who talked about working there. In his words, “Thank God for whiskey!”
While there is some romantic imagery (penguins!) down there, and the disconnect from the rest of the world might be appealing, for large parts of the year you’re just stuck inside.
We hire two people to stay over the winter and operate the detector each year. No icecube affiliation or physics background required, although a technical background helps.
I worked on IceCube. Was at the South Pole for a little over a month. Wild once in a lifetime experience. And if I am being honest I was terribly bored after the first 2 weeks. Its very flat and white and cold and not much to do. I was asked to go back the next year and I said no.
Pretty cool. One of the big challenges in trying neutrino detection in ice is dealing with funding agencies. The optical properties of ice only get good when you are actually a few kilometers deep in very old ice. That is you can't just build a demonstrator in the nearest glacier with a few leftover photomultipliers, you need to go directly to Antarctica and bore a three kilometer hole into the ice. And projects where the MVP is quite expensive are always very hard to get funded.
I remember one of my professor, a pioneer of neutrino detectors in Europe, mentioning Ice Cube in a lecture more than 20 years ago. Long time scale (due to funding).
Neutrino physics is the frontier. It’s one area where we know there are “physics beyond the standard model” though IceCube hasn’t quite been able to answer the neutrino mass question.
That's an uncharitable take. The proposed observatory was through pristine dense forest, and one of the most important elephant corridors in Asia. It was opposed by the democratically elected government, and litigated in courts in an open and transparent way. The physics gains do not outweigh the environmental cost, and the fact that scientists were able to get valuable data from an observatory in the lifeless Antarctic is further justification not to build this.
IceCube observatory is for studying the high energy cosmic neutrinos from a distant galaxy or black holes. But the one proposed INO is to study the low and medium energy atmospheric neutrinos. INO was designed to study the mass ordering of neutrinos. Both observatories are for studying different aspects and properties of neutrinos and are not the same.
Sometimes I think it would be nice if there were biographies that laid out when and how Nobel laureates made their discoveries. Then wouldn't it be possible to pattern how people discover certain phenomena?
The common denominator is money and time. The only way to get more results is to put more funding out there (and accepting that not everything is about a direct ROI).
Not Nobel laureates, but people have tried this. I once was looking for the early education of famous scientists and found the book Cradles of Eminence [1], which compares the childhoods of several hundred famous people.
One thing I noticed was that more than a few were seriously sick in childhood and had to be homeschooled. This includes Edward Morley, Peter Higgs, René Descartes (though I'm not sure how rare it was at his time), and the mathematician Julia Robinson, who was bedridden with scarlet fever at 9 years old, then had to get tutoring to catch back up, and had this to say about it [2]:
> I have since read that a solitary childhood or, what amounts to the same thing, a period of isolation resulting from an illness is frequently noted in the early lives of scientists. I am not sure what the significance of this finding is. Obviously I had to amuse myself for long periods of time, but I didn’t do so with mathematics. I am inclined to think that what I learned during that year in bed was patience.
> By the time I was well enough to go back to school, I had missed more than two years. My parents arranged to have me tutored by a retired elementary school teacher. In one year, working three mornings a week, she and I went through the state syllabuses for the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. It makes me wonder how much time must be wasted in classrooms.
Sidenote: I found the book [1] through asking a free LLM what source this quote might be referring to. They are reasonably good at this kind of literature search, especially because it's easy to judge whether they gave you something useful.
Uh not sure Halzen personally made discoveries, in the original sense of the word!
Indeed, "in-spiraling" seems more like a one-man discovery (or has more of a chance to become one) than many (not all, obv) nobel prize winning work
The mechanism for which Higgs was awarded was also independently discovered by at least ten other people (I can't count)
>The Higgs mechanism is therefore also called the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism, or Englert–Brout–Higgs–Guralnik–Hagen–Kibble mechanism,[9] Anderson–Higgs mechanism,[10] Anderson–Higgs–Kibble mechanism,[11] Higgs–Kibble mechanism by Abdus Salam[12] and ABEGHHK'tH mechanism (for Anderson, Brout, Englert, Guralnik, Hagen, Higgs, Kibble, and 't Hooft)
Can't wait for OpenAI to get the nobel prize; Swedes are more sympathetic than mathematicians!! (so that human beings might completely separate discovery from reward/awards/recognition. Discovery is a human right!!!)
> wouldn't it be possible to pattern how people discover certain phenomena?
This question in the field of "general problem-solving" (inventions etc.) was investigated by studying patent literature by Genrich Altshuller in the former Soviet Union and systematized as TRIZ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
Theory of inventive problem solving' is a methodology which combines an organized, systematic method of problem-solving with analysis and forecasting techniques derived from the study of patterns of invention in global patent literature.
TRIZ developed from a foundation of research into hundreds of thousands of inventions in many fields to produce an approach which defines patterns in inventive solutions and the characteristics of the problems which these inventions have overcome.</i>
Photons work better for driving a car too but being able to hear is still quite useful.
In other words: we already have lots of things that measure photons. You see things on two totally different media it's a lot more compelling than just one.
That may be the case, but it doesn't explain why neutrinos would be essential for intergalactic communication. Maybe the person I was responding to didn't realize neutrinos travel very close to the speed of light, not infinitely fast?
Neutrinos are not an analog to sound in the point you are trying to make. They are many orders of magnitude more weakly interacting and much, much difficult to measure.
Similar to the Millennium prize by the Clay institute, the amount of luck and effort you need to receive the prize don't make it worthwhile. Plus, it's generally expected to use that money for further research. It would be advisable to focus on other endeavors, if money is your motivator.
It could be the beginning of Neutrino astronomy [1]. So far, we only used the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays, to observe the universe. If we could equally leverage neutrinos or gravitational waves, we could observe much more of the universe. For example, the cosmic microwave background radiation enables us to deduce the conditions at 300ky after the Big Bang. The cosmic neutrino background [2] could give us insight in the conditions 1s after the Big Bang.
He receives the prize for conceiving the IceCube neutrino detector, a cubic-kilometer-sized detecter in the Antarctics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory
Mechanism is via conversion of neutrinos into charged particles which are then detected via Cherenkov radiation which is produced when a charged particle moves with speeds larger then the speed of light in the medium. (That is only possible because it is less than the speed of light in vacuum which cannot be exceeded.)
This was also discussed recently if you are interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49655286
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
> produced when a charged particle moves with speeds larger then the speed of light in the medium.
Thanks, I had no idea this was possible!
https://xkcd.com/1053/
And remember, the "speed of light in the medium" depends on the wavelength of the light. This is why prisms separate light by color.
This is quite nuanced and not as most people assume.
It is the "phase velocity of light in that medium" that is exceeded.
phase velocity of light in a medium = speed of light / refractive index of the medium.
Thus the EM wave is slowed down in a medium and so a charged particle can exceed it producing Cherenkov radiation. This is similar to a sonic boom in atmosphere when speed of sound is exceeded. In both cases the object is traveling faster than the wavefront.
It is only in vacuum that "phase velocity of light" = "group velocity of light" = c (i.e. 300,000 km/sec)
What really is the speed of light in a medium/vacuum, group or phase velocity? - https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/450377/what-real...
Optical sonic boom.
If anyone was wondering how some of that heavy stuff gets to the south pole to build such a large engineering project, at the farthest possible end of any logistics chain:
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=south+pol...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole_Traverse
https://octanepress.com/content/south-pole-traverse_antartic...
Significant amounts of things still come in by air cargo at great cost, but a lot also comes the long slow way.
I am adopting “Furthest possible end of any logistics chain” as a more refined version of “middle of fucking nowhere”. Thank you.
It would probably be harder if they wanted to put it, for instance, on the ocean floor at Point Nemo, but for sure the literal south pole is pretty damn expensive on a $ per kg to get stuff sent to. And on an ongoing basis to sustain operations 24x7x365 (it's my understanding it runs almost entirely on diesel fuel and/or Jet-A for a big-ass set of generators).
For sure, there are more difficult places, but I don’t think there is any conceivable place where the supply chain runs through the South Pole on its way. I hope not.
I disagree: anywhere in the ocean is easier logistics than crawler trains over land: ship it there and chuck it overboard. They do that to install oil rigs all the time (but that's more like float it there and sink it). Eg: https://www.wired.com/2014/07/dockwise-vanguard-shipping
Yeah, but now imagine the cost of putting large active electronics 4,000 meters down on the sea floor and keeping it running, and getting the data back off it... The cost of running the drill rig seen in the photos of the icecube detector would be a fraction of that.
That’s also a thing, e.g. in the Mediterranean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KM3NeT
This was fascinating, thank you for posting! Here is a video I found of the different types of sleds they use on the traverse - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjrQrKjotpA
I read all of that and other resources online and still couldn't understand why the hell we need to build that and especially in south pole antartica
Where else would you go look for a cubic km of ice?
Greenland, though that is probably not much better in any measurable way, when it comes to transport.
Another option that's been popular is to get it as deep underground as possible, hard rock mines with empty areas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Neutrino_Observatory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNO+
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande
There's a weird overlap in engineering and physics disciplines between the hard engineering/business practices of the mining industry, and particle physics.
Right, but for those they need to make/move/collect a large amount of transparent material, like heavy water etc for the particles to interact with. But they get that 'for free' with the ice.
and another option is putting it in the sea, see KM3NeT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KM3NeT
Logistics is much easier for Greenland, but the optical properties of the ice are not as good as at the south pole.
The best science comes from areas that have no obvious use. The original insights into nuclear physics, quantum physics and relativity were all pure thought experiments. They led to the world we live in.
I'm personally very happy that we're still funding science that isn't obviously monetised.
The reason for Antarctica is that it's the only place you find cubic kilometres of stable ice that doesn't drift around.
My best guess would be just the remoteness.
1: Ice-mass that isn't contaminated by atomic testing fallout (if the ice has been there since the 40s it's without radioactive waste (faschinating to read about how WW2 wrecks is a prime resource of steel since it's a huge amount of steel without trace amounts of radionucletiods from testing fallout).
2: No current interference (nuclear power, radiowaves,etc) creating possible test uncertainties.
3: I'm sure there are other reasons
The negative naturally is cost, but since the expriment succeeded it will probably be useful for any attempts to send robots or even humanity into space beyond the solar system.
Neutrinos need a large detector volume for efficiency because they interact so rarely. You can’t detect them directly so you need a transparent medium to detect their collision byproducts. Good detector mediums are water and ice, and are underground to minimise background light. There are relatively few places you can do this. Mine caverns and under the sea are the most common, but marine detectors are notoriously hard to build. Francis Halzen proposed using ice. At the Pole, the glacial plateau is 2 miles high and the breakthrough was confirming that the ice is in fact highly transparent if you go deep enough.
Why the pole specifically? You could probably build a second IceCube 100 miles away, but how are you going to get that materials there? Pole has a skiway for large aircraft and infrastructure to house a large number of people. The traverse (SPoT) only became operational near the end of construction - the initial holes were drilled in 2005 and almost everything had to be flown in.
Telescope In The Ice does a great job of explaining the history and science behind the experiment.
If we're serious about AI taking over jobs, we'll probably need to get more comfortable with any kind of undirected work-for-its-own-sake, not less.
The Telescope in the Ice was a solid book about this.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1137280085
The book about it can also be used to detect neutrinos too?
> which are then detected via Cherenkov radiation which is produced when a charged particle moves with speeds larger then the speed of light in the medium. (That is only possible because it is less than the speed of light in vacuum which cannot be exceeded.)
I have been researching applications of FTL as well;
Where is there an actual vacuum on Earth or in microgravity? So, there are Proca waves within dielectric Proca metamaterials and plasmas and waveguides; and photons can have effective mass and/or longitudinal charge Ez in ionized plasma?
So, Maxwellian waves with no longitudinal (Ez,) component can exist in what fraction of the universe if they can only exist in a vacuum?
A Twistor model can model such;
I'm in love with the cute little figure that came with the press release: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2026/10/fig_fy_26_3x2.jpg
I appreciate the boldness of this project, it has an element of sci-fi to it. Building a base at the south pole to bury sensors in ice to measure elusive particles. The stuff of dreams!
To be fair, the base was already there and logistically essential. The IceCube topside building is just a part of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, about a km or so from the Elevated Station.
This image* from Wikipedia surprised me. The topside building is...you could say...the tip of the iceberg. The detectors span a huge area going over 2km deep. The predecessor AMANDA array was also down there.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory#/...
Yes. It spans a cubic kilometer.
The building is just for housing the data gathering and comms equipment and whatever maintenance and engineering stuff the array needs. I don’t think anybody physically works there regularly.
A trillion of these silly small guys pass through us every second. Funny to imagine them like that.
There are many things that my brain just can't handle, the size of the universe, more than 3 dimensions and this fact especially.
I will argue on your behalf that your brain can handle just one more dimension than the 3 you are likely referring to. :)
If you ever feel lonely, think about all those little friends who come visit you!
The same guy (Johan Jarnestad) has been doing all the nobel prize illustrations and infographics for years!
https://www.infographics.se/
https://www.behance.net/JohanJarnestad
Looking at the behance site it's a pretty good choice, glad some illustrators are still making a living in the AI age.
What an amazing accomplishment! I played a very tiny part in this project and went to the South Pole in 2009 to help with construction. Didn't see any neutrinos the entire time I was there though :/
I worked with a guy who worked on IceCube. He flew down to the South Pole, went all the way to the station, just to install debian for their data processing systems. I was... a bit jealous.
We think of receiving a Nobel Prize as something super rare and exceptional and it is. What still always astounds me though, is this:
There are nearly 300 living laureates. Enough to hold a yearly meetup for them in Lindau, where usually about 40 gather. This year, for the event's 75th anniversary, there were even about 70. Imagine that.
> yearly meetup for them in Lindau
IIRC Oppenheimer facilitated / sponsored a meeting there after the Manhattan Project, as a gathering where physicists could talk freely about physics for a change.
Every year a few of the Nobel Prize winners attend the IgNobel Prize ceremony and dance on stage.
The first time in as long as I can think that a single physicist was chosen.
1992
I wonder - was there really no other people they could have given it to? The detection of gravitational waves was split between a theorist, experimentalist and a person who had a big hand in shepherding the project along. Could not the same have been done here?
I would imagine the problem is that there are too many of them.
For better or worse the prize can only go to 3 people. Over the years there are generally many dozens of people who make absolutely critical contributions to these kinds of experiments. In this case, though, the same guy was listed as the PI of the UW Madison group, and Madison is very clearly "the" operator of the project.
Halzen is by any measure an awesome physicist, but he's also a good "fit" for the Nobel because of this unique situation.
I was in the IceCube experiment for a bit as well as the ATLAS Experiment at CERN. So you could say I contributed a bit to both this and the Higgs Nobel. Being part of these big collaborations, you know what the deal is. The Nobel is excellent PR for physics, and science in general, but it is just a prize. Francis is the singular leader of IceCube, and a visionary in the area, it is perfectly fair to award it to him, if not to the total collaboration. As for theory, I don’t think this award hinges on theoretical predictions but the enablement of observation itself.
other relevant people are probably dead
All of science is collaborative and this is especially true in these big experiments: the IceCube collaboration is over 400 people [1] from several dozen institutes. There are a lot of experiments where giving a Nobel prize would be impossible because there's no "principal investigator" for the experiment.
[1]: https://icecube.wisc.edu/collaboration/meet-the-collaboratio...
Well holy shit. I didn't expect to wake up this morning and see the "outside" guy from my thesis committee (aka, the only one who wasn't a rubber stamp) winning the Nobel Prize.
Francis isn't the first Nobel Prize winner I've crossed paths with. But I think he's the only one I'd call a "decent human being". (When I use it, that phrase has a meaning roughly comparable to "nontrivial", so, saying it is nontrivial.) He was well enough liked by faculty and students during my time at UW-Madison.
It's important to note that he's not getting the prize for "conceiving of IceCube" like some people are saying. It's for "conceiving of IceCube and somehow actually making it happen". The latter is the achievement.
Congratulations.
Here's the APOD for IceCube back from 2011
https://science.nasa.gov/image-article/apod-2011-february-13...
Anyone else romanticize going to work at some remote location like the IceCube? Probably some escapism going on
I had a professor who talked about working there. In his words, “Thank God for whiskey!”
While there is some romantic imagery (penguins!) down there, and the disconnect from the rest of the world might be appealing, for large parts of the year you’re just stuck inside.
We hire two people to stay over the winter and operate the detector each year. No icecube affiliation or physics background required, although a technical background helps.
Sounds like the intro to a horror.
I worked on IceCube. Was at the South Pole for a little over a month. Wild once in a lifetime experience. And if I am being honest I was terribly bored after the first 2 weeks. Its very flat and white and cold and not much to do. I was asked to go back the next year and I said no.
was there any clear sky ever? how did it look like? I'm assuming you went during daylight?
Pretty cool. One of the big challenges in trying neutrino detection in ice is dealing with funding agencies. The optical properties of ice only get good when you are actually a few kilometers deep in very old ice. That is you can't just build a demonstrator in the nearest glacier with a few leftover photomultipliers, you need to go directly to Antarctica and bore a three kilometer hole into the ice. And projects where the MVP is quite expensive are always very hard to get funded.
I remember one of my professor, a pioneer of neutrino detectors in Europe, mentioning Ice Cube in a lecture more than 20 years ago. Long time scale (due to funding).
Great news for UW-Madison and all the work that went into such a forward thinking, creative scientific instrument!
The last time a physicist won the award alone dates back to 1992, 34 years ago
Absolute loved this book by Halzen and Martin
https://archive.org/details/quarksleptonsint0000halz
IceCube Neutrino Observatory - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLbegYWCqkg
Madison WI mentioned!
Last years favorite finally wins it this time. https://www.rtbf.be/article/avec-icecube-le-physicien-belge-... (2025)
Neutrino physics is the frontier. It’s one area where we know there are “physics beyond the standard model” though IceCube hasn’t quite been able to answer the neutrino mass question.
As we celebrate the IceCube neutrino detector for wining this year Nobel Prize in Physics, people in my country India should feel lost for missing the opportunity to setup INO (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India-based_Neutrino_Observato...)
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/why-the-neu...
isnt theni the place where hemp farm were destroyed in 1800?
That's an uncharitable take. The proposed observatory was through pristine dense forest, and one of the most important elephant corridors in Asia. It was opposed by the democratically elected government, and litigated in courts in an open and transparent way. The physics gains do not outweigh the environmental cost, and the fact that scientists were able to get valuable data from an observatory in the lifeless Antarctic is further justification not to build this.
IceCube observatory is for studying the high energy cosmic neutrinos from a distant galaxy or black holes. But the one proposed INO is to study the low and medium energy atmospheric neutrinos. INO was designed to study the mass ordering of neutrinos. Both observatories are for studying different aspects and properties of neutrinos and are not the same.
Quite rare for a it to be awarded to just one person.
Sometimes I think it would be nice if there were biographies that laid out when and how Nobel laureates made their discoveries. Then wouldn't it be possible to pattern how people discover certain phenomena?
The common denominator is money and time. The only way to get more results is to put more funding out there (and accepting that not everything is about a direct ROI).
Not Nobel laureates, but people have tried this. I once was looking for the early education of famous scientists and found the book Cradles of Eminence [1], which compares the childhoods of several hundred famous people.
One thing I noticed was that more than a few were seriously sick in childhood and had to be homeschooled. This includes Edward Morley, Peter Higgs, René Descartes (though I'm not sure how rare it was at his time), and the mathematician Julia Robinson, who was bedridden with scarlet fever at 9 years old, then had to get tutoring to catch back up, and had this to say about it [2]:
> I have since read that a solitary childhood or, what amounts to the same thing, a period of isolation resulting from an illness is frequently noted in the early lives of scientists. I am not sure what the significance of this finding is. Obviously I had to amuse myself for long periods of time, but I didn’t do so with mathematics. I am inclined to think that what I learned during that year in bed was patience.
> By the time I was well enough to go back to school, I had missed more than two years. My parents arranged to have me tutored by a retired elementary school teacher. In one year, working three mornings a week, she and I went through the state syllabuses for the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. It makes me wonder how much time must be wasted in classrooms.
Sidenote: I found the book [1] through asking a free LLM what source this quote might be referring to. They are reasonably good at this kind of literature search, especially because it's easy to judge whether they gave you something useful.
[1] https://archive.org/details/cradlesofeminenc0000goer_l9f8/pa...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20181207045746/https://www.maa.o...
thanks!
Uh not sure Halzen personally made discoveries, in the original sense of the word!
Indeed, "in-spiraling" seems more like a one-man discovery (or has more of a chance to become one) than many (not all, obv) nobel prize winning work
The mechanism for which Higgs was awarded was also independently discovered by at least ten other people (I can't count)
>The Higgs mechanism is therefore also called the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism, or Englert–Brout–Higgs–Guralnik–Hagen–Kibble mechanism,[9] Anderson–Higgs mechanism,[10] Anderson–Higgs–Kibble mechanism,[11] Higgs–Kibble mechanism by Abdus Salam[12] and ABEGHHK'tH mechanism (for Anderson, Brout, Englert, Guralnik, Hagen, Higgs, Kibble, and 't Hooft)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism
Can't wait for OpenAI to get the nobel prize; Swedes are more sympathetic than mathematicians!! (so that human beings might completely separate discovery from reward/awards/recognition. Discovery is a human right!!!)
> wouldn't it be possible to pattern how people discover certain phenomena?
This question in the field of "general problem-solving" (inventions etc.) was investigated by studying patent literature by Genrich Altshuller in the former Soviet Union and systematized as TRIZ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
Theory of inventive problem solving' is a methodology which combines an organized, systematic method of problem-solving with analysis and forecasting techniques derived from the study of patterns of invention in global patent literature.
TRIZ developed from a foundation of research into hundreds of thousands of inventions in many fields to produce an approach which defines patterns in inventive solutions and the characteristics of the problems which these inventions have overcome.</i>
See also my older comment for more resources - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45976697
Still no affordable antigravity? Dang.
He's working on it; still in deep black.
Just happy it's not another AI related prize.
+1
Oh, it's amazing that the AI didn't prize.
Why? They gave that out already.
There's no such thing as AI, it's just Jürgen Schmidhuber in a small room typing really really quickly. And no way they're giving him a Nobel Prize.
Just woke up this morning to this news. Thank God. Today is a good day.
Makes me sad, that even there we put our human stuff and Metal boxes
What is practical application of Francis work?
Neutrino detectors are essential in receiving communication from other galaxies.
That doesn't make any sense. Photons would work much better.
Photons work better for driving a car too but being able to hear is still quite useful.
In other words: we already have lots of things that measure photons. You see things on two totally different media it's a lot more compelling than just one.
That may be the case, but it doesn't explain why neutrinos would be essential for intergalactic communication. Maybe the person I was responding to didn't realize neutrinos travel very close to the speed of light, not infinitely fast?
Neutrinos might be a better medium for intergalactic communication, since they can travel through most objects.
Or we can all just think big thoughts at the same time... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calling_Occupants_of_Interplan...
Neutrinos are not an analog to sound in the point you are trying to make. They are many orders of magnitude more weakly interacting and much, much difficult to measure.
The million dollars. A Nobel prize is worth a million dollars.
Similar to the Millennium prize by the Clay institute, the amount of luck and effort you need to receive the prize don't make it worthwhile. Plus, it's generally expected to use that money for further research. It would be advisable to focus on other endeavors, if money is your motivator.
So, two years salary in the Bay Area where it's a lot warmer?
It could be the beginning of Neutrino astronomy [1]. So far, we only used the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays, to observe the universe. If we could equally leverage neutrinos or gravitational waves, we could observe much more of the universe. For example, the cosmic microwave background radiation enables us to deduce the conditions at 300ky after the Big Bang. The cosmic neutrino background [2] could give us insight in the conditions 1s after the Big Bang.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_astronomy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_neutrino_background
Knowing the properties of neutrinos is essential for building the neutrino bomb, the most ethical weapon possible.