100 Trillion Ghosts Just Passed Through You

Right now, about 100 trillion ghost particles are flying through your body — and through the entire planet. This month a physicist won the Nobel Prize for catching them with a detector buried in the ice at the South Pole. We follow the neutrino from Wolfgang Pauli's "terrible idea" in 1930 (and his bet of a case of champagne) to the first catch next to a nuclear reactor, Ray Davis's tank of dry-cleaning fluid in a gold mine, and the discovery that neutrinos change type as they travel. Then the big one: IceCube — 5,160 light sensors frozen into a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice — and how it traced a single neutrino back to a blazar four billion light-years away, saw through the dust of NGC 1068, and made the first picture of the Milky Way in neutrinos. Clear, honest physics in plain words. No degree required. ⏱ CHAPTERS 0:00 100 trillion ghosts 0:46 Pauli's terrible idea 1:42 How ghostly is a ghost? 2:44 Catching the first one 3:27 The missing neutrinos 4:20 Why astronomers want ghosts 5:16 Turning the South Pole into a telescope 6:14 How ice sees a ghost 7:09 Bert, Ernie and a blazar 8:26 The Nobel Prize 9:03 What we still don't know 🔔 Subscribe to Nil Explains for clear, honest physics — no degree required. 💬 Tell us in the comments what we should explain next. #physics #neutrinos #nobelprize