Three Japanese-born scientists will share the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on broken symmetry in subatomic particles, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced this morning.
The winners are Yoichiro Nambu, a naturalized U.S. citizen who is now a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi Institute; Makoto Kobayashi, a professor emeritus at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, in Tsukuba, Japan; and Toshihide Maskawa, a professor emeritus at Kyoto University’s Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics. Mr. Nambu was awarded one-half of the prize, which this year is worth about $1.4-million. Mr. Kobayashi and Mr. Maskawa split the other half.
Mr. Nambu is being honored for devising a mathematical scheme of how elementary particles exhibit something called spontaneous symmetry breaking. That explains how the world we experience can arise out of the fundamental rules of physics, which are expansive and allow many more possibilities.
An ordinary example of spontaneous symmetry breaking is a dinner party in which glasses of water are set equidistant between each guest. Before anyone drinks, it would be possible for each diner to select the glass to the right or the left. But once a person chooses, he or she breaks the symmetry and everyone must follow his or her lead (or risk the wrath of the host). Mr. Nambu’s work was a key factor in the development of the widely accepted Standard Model of how physics operates at the subatomic level.
Mr. Kobayashi and Mr. Maskawa are being recognized for discovering the origin of a particular broken symmetry, in work that predicted the existence of three families of quarks, the building blocks of matter. Their work also helped account for the existence of the universe, 14 billion years after the Big Bang. Broken symmetry apparently explains why, following that theoretical vast expansion of the cosmos, equal amounts of matter and antimatter were not created — and so did not destroy each other.
The winners will collect their awards at a ceremony in December. —Richard Monastersky and Andrew Mytelka
