Two Japanese, American share Nobel physics prize

MATT MOORE and KARL RITTER STOCKHOLM, Sweden – Two Japanese citizens and an American won the 2008 Nobel Prize in physics yesterday for discoveries that help explain the behaviour of the smallest particles of matter.

American Yoichiro Nambu (87) of the University of Chicago, won half of the US$1,4 million prize for the discovery of a mechanism called spontaneous broken symmetry. Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan shared the other half of the prize for discovering the origin of the broken symmetry that predicted the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.The academy said the trio “presented theoretical insights that give us a deeper understanding of what happens far inside the tiniest building blocks of matter”.In physics, the idea of symmetry refers a kind of equality or equivalence in a situation.At the subatomic level, for example, you should not be able to tell whether you are watching events unfold directly or in a mirror, or whether a movie of those events is running forward or backward.And particles should behave just like their alter egos, called antiparticles.If any of these rules is violated, the symmetry is broken.One big broken symmetry arose immediately after the big bang, when just a tiny bit more matter than anti-matter was created.Because these two kinds of particles annihilate each other when they meet, that excess of matter was responsible for seeding the universe.Nambu introduced his description of spontaneous symmetry violation into particle physics in 1960.The Nobel citation said Nambu’s theories now permeate the Standard Model of physics, which is the basic theory of how the universe operates.For example, they help explain why different particles have different masses.In 1972, Kobayashi and Maskawa explained why an experiment eight years before had found that some subatomic particles called kaons failed to follow the rules of symmetry.Their explanation predicted the existence of three unknown subatomic particles called quarks.In fact, scientists discovered those predicted particles between 1974 and 1994.Kobayashi and Maskawa also predicted that symmetry would be broken in the behaviour of other particles, called B-mesons.As early as 2001, scientists confirmed that prediction, too.The Japanese-born Nambu moved to the United States in 1952 and is a professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, where he has worked for 40 years.He became a US citizen in 1970.Kobayashi (64) works for the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation, or KEK, in Tsukuba, Japan.Maskawa (68) is a physics professor at Kyoto Sangyo University in Japan’s ancient capital of Kyoto, who also teaches at Nagoya University in his hometown in central Japan.The last Japanese citizen to win the physics prize was Masatoshi Koshiba of the University of Tokyo in 2002.He shared half of the prize with Raymond Davis Jr of the US for work in detecting cosmic neutrinos.American Riccardo Giacconi received the other half of the prize for his work that led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources.The 2008 prize is “recognising one of the most basic and fundamental aspects of existence”, said Phil Schewe, a physicist and spokesman for the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Maryland.”Nature works in strange ways, and these three physicists helped to explain that strangeness in an ingenious way.”- Nampa-APMakoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan shared the other half of the prize for discovering the origin of the broken symmetry that predicted the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.The academy said the trio “presented theoretical insights that give us a deeper understanding of what happens far inside the tiniest building blocks of matter”.In physics, the idea of symmetry refers a kind of equality or equivalence in a situation.At the subatomic level, for example, you should not be able to tell whether you are watching events unfold directly or in a mirror, or whether a movie of those events is running forward or backward.And particles should behave just like their alter egos, called antiparticles.If any of these rules is violated, the symmetry is broken.One big broken symmetry arose immediately after the big bang, when just a tiny bit more matter than anti-matter was created.Because these two kinds of particles annihilate each other when they meet, that excess of matter was responsible for seeding the universe.Nambu introduced his description of spontaneous symmetry violation into particle physics in 1960.The Nobel citation said Nambu’s theories now permeate the Standard Model of physics, which is the basic theory of how the universe operates.For example, they help explain why different particles have different masses.In 1972, Kobayashi and Maskawa explained why an experiment eight years before had found that some subatomic particles called kaons failed to follow the rules of symmetry.Their explanation predicted the existence of three unknown subatomic particles called quarks.In fact, scientists discovered those predicted particles between 1974 and 1994.Kobayashi and Maskawa also predicted that symmetry would be broken in the behaviour of other particles, called B-mesons.As early as 2001, scientists confirmed that prediction, too.The Japanese-born Nambu moved to the United States in 1952 and is a professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, where he has worked for 40 years.He became a US citizen in 1970.Kobayashi (64) works for the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation, or KEK, in Tsukuba, Japan.Maskawa (68) is a physics professor at Kyoto Sangyo University in Japan’s ancient capital of Kyoto, who also teaches at Nagoya University in his hometown in central Japan.The last Japanese citizen to win the physics prize was Masatoshi Koshiba of the University of Tokyo in 2002.He shared half of the prize with Raymond Davis Jr of the US for work in detecting cosmic neutrinos.American Riccardo Giacconi received the other half of the prize for his work that led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources.The 2008 prize is “recognising one of the most basic and fundamental aspects of existence”, said Phil Schewe, a physicist and spokesman for the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Maryland.”Nature works in strange ways, and these three physicists helped to explain that strangeness in an ingenious way.”- Nampa-AP