By Ron Cowen
The 2008 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to three theoretical physicists for advances involving the concept of symmetry breaking. The theory highlights how three of the four seemingly disparate forces in nature fall under the same umbrella. The work forms a cornerstone of the standard model of particle physics.
Half of the $1.4 million prize goes to Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi Institute. He began formulating his mathematical description of a type of symmetry violation, known as spontaneous broken symmetry, as early as 1960.
The other half is shared by Japanese researchers Makoto Kobayashi of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba and Toshihide Maskawa of KyotoUniversity’s Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics. Kobayashi and Maskawa discovered the origin of another type of symmetry violation that had been observed but not explained. Their work successfully predicted that nature must have at least three families of quarks, which are the fundamental building blocks of matter such as neutrons and protons.
The accomplishments of the winners tie in to the “most essential ideas in our understanding of modern physics,” says physicist Brian Greene of ColumbiaUniversity in New York City.