Most people think of neutrinos as “ghost particles” — tiny, almost massless, and streaming through your body by the trillions every second without leaving a trace. But this theoretical work suggests they may have a much bigger role to play. Imagine the universe as a vast system constantly shuffling disorder — entropy — from one place to another. Normally light takes care of this, carrying heat and information out of stars and across space. But in the most extreme events — the collapse of a giant star, the first instants after the Big Bang — light gets trapped, choked, or slowed. That’s when neutrinos step in. They can slip through matter like it’s almost not there, transporting the chaos that photons can’t.
Think of neutrinos as the universe’s emergency couriers: when normal pathways clog, they move in, racing outward at nearly the speed of light. In a supernova, 99% of the energy doesn’t escape as light — it leaves as a flood of neutrinos. Our framework takes this a step further, showing that neutrinos don’t just carry energy, they carry entropy — the “disorder currency” of the cosmos. They may even define a universal floor for quantum decoherence, placing a fundamental limit on how “orderly” or “coherent” quantum systems can remain. This isn’t just abstract physics: if we’re right, the ghost particles silently streaming through you right now are part of the same cosmic machinery that keeps stars from collapsing, galaxies from freezing, and the universe itself in motion.
It’s a bit like a computer hard drive when it fragments: over time, information gets scattered, slowing things down. A “defrag” reorganizes the data, restoring flow. The universe faces the same problem — disorder builds up, energy paths clog. When photons get jammed, neutrinos act as the defrag utility of reality, sweeping through blocked channels and rebalancing the system. Without them, some of the most violent and spectacular events in the cosmos would grind to a halt under their own entropy.