The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics has been announced. Brian Greene explains the science behind it, and why detecting neutrinos from deep space opens a genuinely new way of observing the universe.
Neutrinos were proposed in the 1930s to account for energy that seemed to vanish during particle interactions and were confirmed experimentally two decades later. They almost never interact with matter, making them hard to detect, but also uniquely valuable since they arrive from their source essentially undisturbed. Brian walks through how the IceCube detector works, why it is buried deep in Antarctic ice, and what it means that a detector that size records only about one of these high-energy neutrinos per day.
This program is part of the Rethinking Reality series, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.
