DURING my final year of high school, in 1998, my mother excitedly announced to me one day that neutrinos had mass. I didn’t care, and I couldn’t figure out why she did. At the time, I didn’t realise what a big deal it was. I didn’t even know what a neutrino was and arrogantly thought that because I hadn’t heard about them, they weren’t terribly important. By the time Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald shared a 2015 Nobel prize for their role in the discovery, I knew more about these weird particles.

Neutrinos are, in my …