He spent 30 years catching ghosts in the South Pole ice

Every second, about 65 billion neutrinos from the Sun pass through your little fingernail, and you feel nothing. They carry no charge and almost no mass, so they slip through you, and through the whole planet, without a trace. On October 6, Francis Halzen, 82, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, won the physics Nobel for finding a way to catch a few. He won it alone, the first solo physics prize since 1992.

You can't net a ghost, so he used ice. IceCube is 5,160 light sensors frozen into a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, between 1.5 and 2.5 kilometers down. Once in a great while a neutrino from deep space strikes an atom in that ice and throws off a faint blue flash. The sensors, which Halzen calls "a lightbulb in reverse," are waiting for it.

He first pitched the idea in 1988. On Christmas Eve 1993 he sat at the dinner table with a computer on his lap, waiting to hear whether the first cable had gone into the ice. The first results were a letdown, because the upper ice was full of bubbles that scattered the light, but below 1,400 meters it turned out almost perfectly clear. The detector was finished in 2011 for $271 million, and in 2013 it caught the first neutrinos from beyond our solar system. "Very few thought it would work, including myself," Halzen said. And the sky it found is stranger than ours. Lit by galaxies far beyond our own, a neutrino sky is so bright that, he says, "you don't see the Milky Way."

The proverb comes from a collection King Hezekiah's scribes copied out (Proverbs 25:1), and it sets two glories side by side, one for God and one for kings. In that world the king was the last court of appeal. When nobody else could get to the bottom of a matter, he was expected to, so searching was part of the job. The line has never heard of a particle, but it knows what the searching is after: whatever God has tucked out of sight.

In the proverb, God hides things so that someone will go looking.

A cynic sees $271 million spent chasing ghosts, and a triumphalist sees humanity conquering the cosmos. Halzen talks instead about luck, and about the "courageous people" who signed on when "no respectable conservative physicist would have joined me." After fifteen years of development and another decade of construction, he has said, "there was no guarantee we would ever see anything." Had those 5,160 sensors sat in the ice for decades without a single blue flash, the proverb would still count the waiting as glory.