A Japanese and a Canadian scientist won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics yesterday for discovering that elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos have mass.
Neutrinos are the second most bountiful particles after photons with trillions of them streaming through our bodies every second.
University of Tokyo professor Takaaki Kajita and Canada’s Queen’s University Professor Emeritus Arthur B McDonald’s breakthrough was the discovery of a phenomenon called neutrino oscillation.
“It is a discovery that will change the books in physics,” Barbro Asman, Nobel committee member and professor of physics at Stockholm University, told Reuters.
Kajita and McDonald, using different experiments, explained that neutrinos change identities and therefore must have some mass, however small.
The SEK8m ($962,000) physics prize is the second of this year’s Nobels.
