Physicists study neutrinos in part because neutrinos are such odd characters: they seem to break the rules that describe nature at its most fundamental. “We don’t know where it’s going to lead,” says Boris Kayser, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. It’s unclear what practical applications will come from studying neutrinos. These strangely beautiful devices are monuments to humankind’s resolve to learn about the universe. Enormous ones have been placed in gold and nickel mines, in tunnels beneath mountains, in the ocean and in Antarctic ice. So that neutrinos aren’t confused with cosmic rays (subatomic particles from outer space that do not penetrate the earth), detectors are installed deep underground. To capture these elusive entities, physicists have conducted some extraordinarily ambitious experiments. What’s more, neutrinos, unlike most subatomic particles, have no electric charge-they’re neutral, hence the name-so scientists can’t use electric or magnetic forces to capture them. Any instrument designed to do so may feel solid to the touch, but to neutrinos, even stainless steel is mostly empty space, as wide open as a solar system is to a comet. The problem for physicists is that neutrinos are impossible to see and difficult to detect. About 100 trillion neutrinos pass through our bodies every second. They come straight through the earth at nearly the speed of light, all the time, day and night, in enormous numbers. They’re among the lightest of the two dozen or so known subatomic particles and they come from all directions: from the Big Bang that began the universe, from exploding stars and, most of all, from the sun.
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