When Laura Dominé was getting her Ph.D. in physics at Stanford University, her research was on neutrinos: elementary particles, minuscule even to physicists, that to laypeople sound made-up. Neutrinos are almost massless and electrically neutral, and therefore they pass through matter as if it were air. Trillions of the so-called ghost particles are zipping through you right now unnoticed, continuing journeys that began, for many of them, a single second after the Big Bang.
The detectors built to find evidence of neutrinos are themselves fantastical things. These cavernous chambers, deep in the Earth, are filled with heavy water or liquid ...