This is a summary of remarks reported by broadcasters and news agencies. Links are at the end.

Francis Halzen joined the Nobel press conference on 6 October by telephone, and told Flemish broadcaster VRT afterwards that he was completely taken aback. He said he had not expected the prize at all.

"I didn't believe it"

The weekend before the announcement, at a science festival in Bergamo, Italy, someone had suggested he might win. He told VRT that he did not believe it then. Speaking to the Associated Press, he said that even though the prize had been predicted, the announcement left him feeling strange.

Credit to the builders

Halzen used his first remarks to thank the scientists who built the IceCube detector, especially those who backed the project at the start and made the crucial early decisions. When the work began, he said, nobody knew whether it would succeed, himself included. He credited talented collaborators and a good deal of luck.

Wisconsin Public Radio reported that sceptics once dismissed the idea of a detector buried in the Antarctic ice as charming but unworkable.

A joke about funding

Halzen also joked that he is working on a new proposal and hopes the prize will help it get approved, a reminder that even Nobel laureates spend much of their time asking for funding.

Who he is

Halzen, 82, is a Vilas Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which operates IceCube. According to WPR, he is the first active UW–Madison faculty member to win a Nobel Prize since 1975.

Sources