Catching Ghosts at the South Pole: The Inside Story of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics

Talks on Tuesdays: Real lectures in your favourite venues. 45-mins + Q&A with Dr Pascal Gutjahr Adelaide Talks on Tuesdays is a live event series bringing big ideas, real experts, and curious minds together - at your favourite local venues. Think thought-provoking lectures, audience questions, and post-talk mingling over drinks and dinner. This isn’t a uni lecture. It’s a social, intelligent night out.Come alone or with friends, leave with something to talk about. Event Schedule: 6.30pm Arrival & Doors Open 7pm Lecture Starts 7.45pm Q&A 8pm Talk Concludes 8.30pm Event Closes. *Please arrive close to 6.30pm A La Carte menu and full bar available throughout the night - pay as you go. Your Topic: Catching Ghosts at the South Pole: The Inside Story of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics Every second, around 60 billion ghost particles pass through your thumbnail. They pass right through the Earth too, and you will never feel a single one. They’re called neutrinos, the most mysterious messengers in the universe. They barely interact with anything, which lets them cross the cosmos untouched. They carry news from exploding stars, giant black holes, and other places light can’t reach. It also makes them almost impossible to catch. So how do you catch a ghost? You go to the end of the world. At the South Pole, scientists drilled 2.5 km into the Antarctic ice and lowered more than 5,000 light sensors into the dark. The result is IceCube, a telescope made of a cubic kilometre of ice. On Tuesday, 6 October 2026, it won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Dr Pascal Gutjahr takes you inside this wildly ambitious experiment. You’ll hear stories from the ice, see what life at the Pole looks like, and learn how machine learning finds a handful of cosmic ghosts among billions of ordinary signals. Your Speaker: Dr Pascal Gutjahr Dr Pascal Gutjahr is a research fellow in astroparticle physics at Adelaide University. He has been part of the IceCube collaboration for more than seven years, since his master’s thesis. IceCube is a global team of hundreds of scientists who run a detector buried deep in the Antarctic ice. Pascal studied physics and completed his PhD at TU Dortmund in Germany, with a research stay at Berkeley in the US along the way. His work sits where physics meets data science: using statistics and machine learning to find rare signals hidden in mountains of data. Pascal knows this year’s Nobel laureate personally. He first sat down with Francis Halzen at a conference dinner in Paris at the very start of his PhD, and has crossed paths with him at IceCube collaboration meetings ever since. That makes this talk a rare inside view of a Nobel Prize from someone who is part of the team.