Not an everyday event
It’s not everyday that a country sees to three of its fellow nationals winning the Nobel Prize for Physics. The study from these Japanese scientists involves the new discoveries on subatomic physics.
Two Japanese citizens and a Japanese-born American won the 2008 Nobel Prize in physics for discoveries in the world of subatomic physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Tuesday.
American Yoichiro Nambu, 87, of the University of Chicago, won half of the prize for the discovery of a mechanism called spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics. Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan shared the other half of the prize for discovering the origin of the broken symmetry that predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.
“Spontaneous broken symmetry conceals nature’s order under an apparently jumbled surface,” the academy said in its citation. “Nambu’s theories permeate the standard model of elementary particle physics. The model unifies the smallest building blocks of all matter and three of nature’s four forces in one single theory.”
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