Crosscut · 26 min
Catching Cosmic Rays
How did the hunt for invisible particles go from a lone physicist hauling photographic plates up the Himalayas to an international team drilling sensors into a billion tons of Antarctic ice?
I’m a Physicist Who Worked on the Nobel-winning Neutrino Search – Here’s How a Cubic Kilometer of Antarctic Ice Became a Telescope for Ghost Particles From Space × How Photography Helped Physicist Bibha Chowdhuri See the Invisible in the 1930s
Published 2026-10-17
0:00 / 25:32 · Narrator Sulafat/Charon/Vindemiatrix
In this episode
The Conversation
I’m a Physicist Who Worked on the Nobel-winning Neutrino Search – Here’s How a Cubic Kilometer of Antarctic Ice Became a Telescope for Ghost Particles From Space
by Tyce DeYoung, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State University
Scroll.in
How Photography Helped Physicist Bibha Chowdhuri See the Invisible in the 1930s
by Kamayani Sharma
The connection
A stack of photographic plates in a Himalayan cabin might seem a world away from a billion tons of wired Antarctic ice. Yet both are traps set to catch invisible particles raining down from space. In Scroll.in, Kamayani Sharma looks back at the 1930s, when physicist Bibha Chowdhuri used simple plates to trace cosmic rays. On the other end of the scale, Tyce DeYoung explains in The Conversation how a modern team transformed a cubic kilometer of the South Pole into a neutrino telescope. What’s striking when reading these accounts together is how the hunt for the universe’s smallest ghosts has shifted—from a single researcher hiking a mountain to hundreds of scientists wiring the bottom of the world.
Finish reading Tyce DeYoung, and particle physics looks like a massive, continent-spanning enterprise. You picture hundreds of scientists wiring a billion tons of Antarctic ice just to catch a single ghost particle. The sheer physical scale of the project is almost impossible to hold in your head. Kamayani Sharma, up next, winds the clock back to the 1930s and shrinks that hunt down to a single researcher. Instead of an international team drilling into the South Pole, her piece follows a 26-year-old physicist leaving photographic plates in a Himalayan mountain cabin. The target is exactly the same—catching the invisible debris of cosmic rays raining down from space. Read alongside DeYoung, Sharma’s historical account makes that giant Antarctic telescope feel like the endpoint of a very old, very quiet tradition. You realize how the machinery of science has exploded in size, even as the actual obsession hasn't changed at all. Going from a billion-ton ice trap to a young woman developing film to find microscopic, star-like tracks puts the whole pursuit into perspective.
A few glass plates in a mountain cabin and a billion tons of wired ice share the exact same job. The tools used to catch the universe’s smallest particles have grown from something one researcher could carry in a rucksack to an operation requiring hundreds of people. The physical scale of discovery has exploded. Yet the human impulse remains unchanged: standing in the cold, waiting for a brief signal from the dark. As the machinery needed to see the invisible grows larger, what is lost when science requires a small army instead of a single curious mind?