Nobel Physics winners Nambu, Kobayashi and Maskawa

[Martin]

excerpts from the NYT article:

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/science/08nobel.html?hp

 

 

" ...Yoichiro Nambu, of the University of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi Insitute, will receive half of the 10 million kroner prize (about $1.3 million) awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

 

Makoto Kobayashi, of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) Tsukuba, Japan, and Toshihide Maskawa, of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University, will each receive a quarter of the prize..."

 

"...for their work exploring the hidden symmetries between elementary particles that are the deepest constituents of nature..."

 

"...in the 1960s, Dr. Nambu,... suggested that some symmetries in the laws of nature might be hidden or "broken" in actual practice...

...In 1972, Dr. Kobayashi and Dr. Maskawa... showed that if there were three generations of the elementary particles called quarks, the constituents of protons and neutrons, this principle of symmetry breaking would explain a puzzling asymmetry known as CP violation. This was discovered in 1964 ..."

 

"...C and P stand respectively for charge and parity, or "handedness." Until then, physicists had naively assumed that if you exchanged positive for negative and left-handed and right-handed in the equations of elementary particles, you would get the same answer.

 

The fact that nature operates otherwise, physicists hope, is a step on the way to explaining why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter..."