They won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, but their legacy’s just beginning.
“I know all about neutrinos, and my friend here knows about everything else in astrophysics.” -John Bahcall, neutrino scientist
If you want to describe the Universe we live in today, from a physical point of view, there are only three things you need to understand:
1. What different types of particles are allowed to be present within it,
2. What the laws are that govern the interactions between all those different particles, and
3. What initial conditions the Universe starts off with.
If you give a scientist all of those things and an arbitrary amount of calculational power, they can reproduce the entirety of the Universe we experience today, limited only by the quantum uncertainty inherent to our experience.