Staring At The Sun

"As I look up at the Sun for a second, a billion neutrinos pass through my eyeball. Of course, they are not stopped at the retina as ordinary photons are but continue unmolested through the back of my head. The curious part is that if at night I look down at the ground, toward the place where the Sun would be (if the Earth were not in the way), almost exactly the same number of solar neutrinos pass through my eyeball, pouring through an interposed Earth which is as transparent to neutrinos as a pane of clear glass is to visible light."
(Carl Sagan, Cosmos)

Now, thanks to today's Nobel Prize for Science winners,  Takaaki Kajita in Japan and Arthur B. McDonald in Canada, we know that neutrinos have mass. Suddenly, I feel like I'm being silently, invisibly and painlessly raped by the Sun.


Breathe. Us in. Slowly. Slowly.