Gary Hill searches an invisible world for particles a fellow physicist calls "the most tiny quantity of reality ever imagined by a human being." It's a neutrino, a ghostly bit of mass that travels at the speed of light. Neutrinos are so small they pass through solid matter, and that makes them almost impossible to study in mass -- even with supercolliders. But Hill and his colleagues have found a way, thanks to a unique circumstance in one of the most isolated and brutal environments on the planet: the South Pole.
Most of the year Hill, a 40-year-old Australian, draws up complex theories at the University of Wisconsin, but each winter he spends a month in Antarctica, working on a project called IceCube. Hill's team of about 100 is building an unorthodox quarter-billion-dollar telescope, using the ice as the world's largest lens.
Time has squeezed the air bubbles...
For the complete article, see the October 2007 Men's Journal, page 103.