And the Nobel prize in Physics 2008 goes to…Yoichiro Nambu (1/2), Makoto Kobayashi (1/4), and Toshihide Maskawa (1/4) “for discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics” and “for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.” I’m buried under work but if I can claw myself out of it I’ll write a post about their work. In the meantime, here is the Nobel’s scientific background.
O brave new quantum world!
Dave, this is wonderful news, and a richly deserved award!
About 10^100 years ago, I was a graduate student in Yoichiro Nambu’s theory group at the U of C. From my personal graduate-student experience, I can attest that Nambu is not only a brilliantly creative theorist, he is also a wonderful teacher and an outstanding administrator.
The sole injustice of the Nobel Award is that Nambu might reasonably have been awarded it twenty years ago.