The 2015 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded jointly to Takaaki Kajita of the University of Tokyo, and Arthur B. McDonald of Queen’s University in Canada for the discovery that neutrinos have mass.
Neutrinos are basically particles of blue light that act as cosmic messengers from some of the most powerful processes in the universe, such as black holes and gamma-ray burst explosions.
But you don’t have to be in Japan or Canada specifically to study and learn from neutrinos. In fact, Dr. Francis Halzen studies them from Madison, where he is a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin. He is also the principal investigator of the IceCube Project.
The IceCube Project is a remote research station that resides in Antarctica, where a team studies neutrinos by basically ice fishing for them with light.
Halzen was in Milwaukee recently to give the Coyne lecture at Marquette University.
