The IceCube observatory at the South Pole looks for neutrinos from the most violent astrophysical sources, like exploding stars.
NSF/Xinhua/Landov
Right now, as you are reading these very words, trillions of particles called neutrinos are streaming through your body. Hardly a single atom in your body feels their passage. Hardly one of the trillion neutrinos feels your presence. They are ghosts to you as you are to them. But that doesn’t mean these tiny flecks of matter don’t matter.
Neutrinos, it turns out, have shaped the universe and their remarkable story has now been expertly told in a new book by astrophysicist Ray Jayawardhana. It’s called Neutrino Hunters.
Neutrinos rarely get the press they deserve. Writers love to wax breathless about Higgs Bosons, antimatter, hypothetical thingies like tachyons (faster-than-light particles) and, of course, whatever makes up Dark Matter. But the ghostly neutrino turns out to be essential to everything from the physics of the early universe to the fusion reactions that keep the sun burning to the supernovas that light up the cosmos.
More importantly, the story of their discovery constitutes a tour of the last century’s most interesting ideas and people in physics. Professor Jayawardhana, with skills as both a story teller and explicator of difficult science, is more than up to the task as a tour guide. (Full disclosure: I have met Jayawardhana a number of times in professional settings; we both work in the domains of star and planet formation.)
cited from:
https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2014/01/12/261939210/the-ghosts-of-physics