00:00Buried a kilometer deep in Antarctic ice, there is a telescope the size of a mountain range,
00:05and today, it just won the biggest prize in science. This is the story of the ghost particle
00:11hunt and the 82-year-old physicist who refused to give up. The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to
00:17Francis Halzen, a Belgian-born physicist at the University of Wisconsin and the mastermind behind
00:22IceCube. Born in the Belgian town of Tianan in 1944, Halzen earned his doctorate at KU Leuven
00:29and joined the University of Wisconsin in 1972, where he still works today. The official
00:35citation, for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery
00:40of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin. In plain words, he built the world's largest
00:46telescope out of a cubic kilometer of clear Antarctic ice and used it to catch the most
00:51elusive particles in the universe. So, what are neutrinos? They are ghost particles, nearly
00:57massless, electrically neutral, and almost impossible to catch. Every second, trillions
01:02of them stream through your body, and through the entire Earth, without leaving a trace.
01:07But because they travel in straight lines across the universe, they carry pristine information
01:12about the most violent events in existence. That is what made Halzen's idea so radical.
01:17Back in the 1980s, he said,
01:19Let's turn a chunk of the South Pole into a detector. Thousands of light sensors, frozen a mile and a
01:25half
01:25deep in the clearest ice on the planet, waiting for the faintest flash of a ghost.
01:29The finished detector watches more than 100,000 neutrinos every year, from 1 to a million GeV.
01:36Building it took decades. It switched on in 2010, and then the universe started talking.
01:42In 2013, IceCube made the first-ever detection of cosmic neutrinos, particles from beyond our galaxy.
01:49It was named the Physics Breakthrough of the Year.
01:51In 2018, it traced a high-energy neutrino to a blizzard, a supermassive black hole at the center
01:57of an active galaxy, billions of light-years away. In 2022, it found neutrino emission from
02:03the active galaxy NGC 1068. A year later, it caught neutrinos streaming from our own Milky Way.
02:10Each discovery answered a century-old question. Where did cosmic rays come from? The answer?
02:15The universe's most powerful accelerators. The supermassive black holes at the hearts of active
02:21galaxies. Astronomers say IceCube opened a third window on the universe, after light and after
02:27gravitational waves. The road was paved with honors. The 2013 Breakthrough of the Year, the 2015 Balzen
02:34Prize, and this year, the American Physical Society's Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research.
02:39It was a 40-year quest, and the Nobel Committee noticed the persistence. Committee Chair Mark
02:45Pierce said,
02:46His tenacity and scientific vision has paved the way for a new kind of astronomy.
02:51Halzen himself was caught off guard. Phoned from Italy, he said it was a great surprise,
02:56and he obviously didn't expect it. The prize money? 12 million Swedish kronor. About 1.2 million dollars.
03:03This is just day two of Nobel Week. The medicine prize was announced yesterday. Chemistry comes tomorrow,
03:09then literature, peace, and economics. Last year's physics prize went to three scientists for quantum
03:15tunneling, the science inside MRI machines and faster cell phones. But today belongs to a physicist,
03:21a telescope made of ice, and the ghosts it finally caught. And if a single ghost particle can rewrite
03:26astronomy, imagine what the next 40 years will find. If this blew your mind, hit subscribe,
03:32because the universe is still full of secrets, and we are telling every single one of them.
