Nambu, Kobayashi, and Maskawa win the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.022756
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At a press conference this morning 87-year-old Nambu said he was awakened by a telephone call from the academy. “I was surprised and honored. I didn’t expect it. I’ve been told for many years that I was on the list (to get the award),” he said. “I had almost given up.”
Nambu moved to the United States from Japan in 1952 and has worked at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, where he has worked for 40 years.
In Japan, 64-year-old Kobayashi at his own press conference said “It’s an honor to receive the prize for my work from long time ago.”
In a separate news conference at his university, 68-year-old Maskawa said, “As a scientist, I’m not thrilled by the prize.”
“I was happier when our findings were acknowledged [by the community] around 2002. The Nobel prize is a rather mundane thing.”
In a review of Jeremy Bernstein’s “The Tenth Dimension: An Informal History of High Energy Physics” ( August 1989, page 65 ) Robert March recommends the book for giving Makoto “Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa the recognition they deserve, but rarely get, for anticipating the discovery of the third generation in their model of CP violation”. After today that recognition will be widely known.
Passion for symmetry
The fact that our world does not behave perfectly symmetrically is due to deviations from symmetry at the microscopic level.
As early as 1960, Yoichiro Nambu formulated his mathematical description of spontaneous broken symmetry in elementary particle physics. Spontaneous broken symmetry conceals nature’s order under an apparently jumbled surface. It has proved to be extremely useful, and Nambu’s theories permeate the standard model of elementary particle physics. The model unifies the smallest building blocks of all matter and three of nature’s four forces in one single theory.
The spontaneous broken symmetries that Nambu studied differ from the broken symmetries described by Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa. These spontaneous occurrences seem to have existed in nature since the very beginning of the universe and came as a complete surprise when they first appeared in particle experiments in 1964. It is only in recent years that scientists have come to fully confirm the explanations that Kobayashi and Maskawa made in 1972. It is for this work that they are now awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. They explained broken symmetry within the framework of the Standard Model, but required that the Model be extended to three families of quarks. These predicted, hypothetical new quarks have recently appeared in physics experiments. As late as 2001, the two particle detectors BaBar at Stanford, USA and Belle at Tsukuba, Japan, both detected broken symmetries independently of each other. The results were exactly as Kobayashi and Maskawa had predicted almost three decades earlier.
A hitherto unexplained broken symmetry of the same kind lies behind the very origin of the cosmos in the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago. If equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created, they ought to have annihilated each other. But this did not happen, there was a tiny deviation of one extra particle of matter for every 10 billion antimatter particles. It is this broken symmetry that seems to have caused our cosmos to survive.
Related Physics Today Articles
The Asymmetry Between Matter and Antimatter February 2003, page 30
Novel B Factories Close in on the Violation of CP Symmetry May 2001, page 17
At Last We Have an Undisputed Observation of `Direct’ CP Violation in Kaon Decay May 1999, page 17
Two Experiments Observe Explicit Violation of Time-Reversal Symmetry February 1999, page 72
Broken Symmetry: Selected Papers of Y. Nambu (Review) October 1996, page 72
The Tenth Dimension: An Informal History of High Energy Physics (Review) August 1989, page 65
Pions to Quarks: Particle Physics in the 1950s November 1988, page 56
Flavor SU(3) Symmetries in Particle Physics April 1988, page 29
CERN Experiment Clarifies Origin of CP Symmetry Violation October 1988, page 17
Neutral B Mesons Show Surprisingly Large Flavor Mixing August 1987, page 17
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