A study of fourteen Wisconsin kitchens finds the IceCube award has made ordinary ice trays aware of deep space, and nobody will eat the peas.
Francis Halzen won the Nobel prize in physics for turning South Pole ice into a neutrino detector. Dr Petra Voidwell's study of fourteen Wisconsin freezers finds that ordinary ice has now got the same idea. One family has moved into the garage to get away from a tub of mint chocolate chip.
A tub of mint chocolate chip in Madison, Wisconsin, is no longer safe to eat. On Wednesday a particle from outside our galaxy passed straight through it. The family who own the tub have taped the freezer shut and moved into the garage.
This follows this week's Nobel prize in physics. Prof Francis Halzen won it for turning a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice into a telescope for neutrinos. A neutrino is a particle that passes through everything and bothers nothing. That is the whole particle.
His detector, IceCube, found the first high-energy neutrinos from space in 2013. It is a fine result. It took decades and a great deal of drilling. I mention it only because it caused the problem.
Once the committee said a block of ice could detect neutrinos, I wanted to know whether other ice could. So I looked at fourteen household freezers in Dane County. Seven I left alone, so I would have something to compare against. The other seven I told about the prize.
Every freezer I told started reporting neutrinos within a day. The ones I kept in the dark carried on freezing peas. The chance that this is luck is less than one in twenty. I could still be wrong, but I do not think I am.
The particles are not the problem. About a hundred trillion of them pass through each of us every second, and always have. The problem is that people now know. An ice tray that has learned it is an observatory does not go back to making ice.
Marjorie Tull, who speaks for the Wisconsin Frozen Food Council, called the situation the end of the household freezer as we understand it.
"You cannot ask a family to keep fish fingers inside a scientific instrument. They start asking what the fish fingers have detected. Then nobody eats."
I asked the fourteen households what they would do next. Nine said they would buy a second freezer and tell it nothing. Four said they would eat everything at once, before it learned more. One has opened a lab notebook for the chest freezer and declined to be interviewed.
As for the prize itself, the science is settled and rather dull. We now know, roughly, where the neutrinos come from. That is the sort of thing we tidy away in a textbook and forget. The ice cream is another matter. It has seen something from another galaxy, and it is still in the garage, where no one will look at it.
