Nambu, Kobayashi, and Maskawa win the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics
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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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Comments
The discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics is a development for which the Nobel Prize in physics is well deserved.
A model which predicted the existence of three additional quarks well before they were discovered is quite profound.
The existence of an overwhelming preponderance of matter over antimatter as the apparent result of a broken symmetry wherein there was one extra normal matter particle or every 10 billion antimatter particles has profoundly altered the evolution of our universe including allowing life as we know it to exist.
In certain theories of the Big Bang, there may exist an ensemble to an infinite number of domains wherein each domain is akin to a section of a huge ice crystal wherein within the given domain or crystal sub-component, the crystalline structure is uniform and with its own particular orientation. Accordingly, each domain within our universe or Big Bang may have its own unique combination of the laws of physics, relative strengths of fundamental forces, values of fundamental constants, numbers of fundamental particle species etc., as a result of the particular values of such parameters that were frozen out as the universe cooled from its initial incredibly hot and dense state.
These domains might, according to some versions of the respective models each have an infinite extent.
I have often wondered if humanity in the very far cosmically distant future will determine how to access any existent alternate domains as such. To find a domain wherein there was 1 extra antimatter particle for every 10 billion normal matter particles would provide an inexhaustible supply of antimatter which could be reacted with normal matter for energy generation.
Now the latter sounds far out, but who really knows what we will be able to accomplish in some distant epoch given the many fine minds that well exist and build on the foundations laid by these three brilliant scientists for which the Nobel Prize was just rewarded.
Consider Isaac Newton’s simple experiments which led to the formulation of Newton’s Laws of motion such as F = MA and the like. Newton and his colleagues would no doubt be totally impressed with the modern Space Shuttle, the International Space Station, as well as the plethora of space probes that we have sent throughout our planetary solar system.
Posted by: James M. Essig | October 7, 2008 6:06 PM