lift an observation instrument 40 kilometers up into the stratosphere in search of almost undetectable subatomic particles. As it rises, this small-looking bubble of helium will expand to fill the entire skin, which here still looks like a white rope. It will eventually form a gigantic globe more than 300 feet in diameter. When it reaches the stratosphere, the detector will scan thousands of square miles of ice without encountering electrical disturbances from the inhabited world. Prior to the launch, we were inside the hangar. The neutrino project is led by Dr. Gorham of the University of Hawaii. So, what we're trying to do with this instrument is to be the first scientific group to detect the highest energy neutrinos in the universe, we hope. Yeah, but, Dr. Gorham, what exactly is a neutrino? The neutrino is... It's the most ridiculous particle you could imagine. A billion neutrinos went through my nose as we were talking. A trillion, a trillion of them went through my nose just now, and they did nothing to me. They pass through all of the matter around us continuously, in a huge, huge blast of particles that does nothing at all. They're like... They almost exist in a separate universe, but we know, as physicists, we can measure them, we can make precision predictions and measurements. They exist, but we can't get our hands on them, because they seem to just exist in another place, and yet without neutrinos, the beginning of the universe would