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Particle Physicists Share the Physics Nobel

Posted by timothy on from the wave-physicists-get-it-simultaneously dept.

somegeekynick writes "The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has been jointly awarded to Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago 'for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics,' and Makoto Kobayashi of the KEK lab and Toshihide Maskawa of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, both in Japan, 'for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.'"

5 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Nambu ok, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Nobel prize to Yoichiro Nambu is highly deserved, but the other two are not really. It should have gone to Nicola Cabibbo, their work is just a multidimensional generalization of his model.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa_matrix

    1. Re:Nambu ok, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Cabibbo did not predict the charm quark. Glashow, Iliopoulos, and Maiani did.

      What Cabibbo did was to express the relationship between [down, strange] strong eigenstates and [down, strange] weak eigenstates by means of a 2x2 rotation matrix, characterized by a rotation angle (known as the Cabibbo angle, which is around 13 degrees). Useful, but not Nobel-prize stuff. What Kobayashi and Maskawa did was not simply to change from two to three. They used Cabibbo's germ of an idea to describe the entire weak hadronic sector.

      If anyone else deserved to have shared their prize, it would have been Lincoln Wolfenstein, whose parametrization of the CKM matrix greatly increased both its conceptual power and its accessibility to experimental analysis.

  2. Re:Curious by srjh · · Score: 2, Informative

    They also tend not to award prizes so soon after the discoveries (the prize for medicine this year was for discovering HIV almost 30 years ago).

    Part of the requirement of receiving a Nobel prize is living long enough after your work to be recognised for it (they are not awarded posthumously).

  3. Not for experimental particle physics. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Theory is one thing, experiment another. (it's quite relevant due to the wording in Nobel's will)

    Prizes to experimental discoveries, in particular anticipated ones, can come quite quickly.

    CERN's last Nobel, to Carlo Rubbia, was in 1984 for a discovery (W and Z bosons) made the previous year.

    If the LHC discovers the Higgs boson, a Nobel prize within short order is almost certain.

  4. Re:Bose anyone? by Geoffrey.landis · · Score: 4, Informative

    As an Indian, its kinda disheartening that Bose didn't get the Nobel.

    Well, Satyendra Nath Bose died in 1974... one of the rules of the Nobel prize that they don't break is that it only goes to living scientists, so they were hardly likely to give the 2008 prize to him. (The dead scientists can't appreciate the honor, so it makes sense to give it to them while they're alive.)

    --
    http://www.geoffreylandis.com