Particle Physicists Share the Physics Nobel

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.'"

Comments

w00t

[Poltras]

Grats boys! Phat loot.

Re:w00t

[TheNecromancer]

How do you know they are "boys"? Japanese names are hard (for non-Japanese) to determine the gender just by reading them.

Sexist!

Re:w00t

[rugatero]

Sure is one ugly woman...

Re:w00t

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

World-class physicists.

Curious

[pjt33]

It's interesting that they should award a Nobel for particle physics now, when there's a very real possibility that discoveries at the LHC will make an outstanding case for another within just a few years. Normally they won't award two prizes to the same field in a short timeframe. I'm glad that they didn't take that into account and deny these worthy winners, and I hope that it doesn't impact on any decisions in the near future.

Re:Curious

[j-beda]

Nobel prizes (at least in physics - I don't follow the others as much) often tend to lag the discoveries for a fairly large number of years, and they try to go for things that are widely accepted. Fr example Einstein got it in 1921 for work published in 1905 on the Photoelectric Effect, Leggett's 2003 prize was for work done in the 1980s I think, and Kilby's prize in 2000 was for the integrated circuit obviously done more than a few years earlier. If the LHC has any Nobel prize fallout, it will not hit for at least a decade.

Re:Curious

[srjh]

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).

Re:Curious

[Leafheart]

It's interesting that they should award a Nobel for particle physics now, when there's a very real possibility that discoveries at the LHC will make an outstanding case for another within just a few years.

Even if the LHC changes how we view the subatomic world, their contributions can't be denied. I even think that it was on purpose: knowing that the LHC will make more discoveries worthing of a Nobel, they decided to award it now, as not to award again on an even shorter period of time.
I'm not sure if I agree with the Committee politics of awarding the prizes after many years, "to let the theory settles", although I agree it is a good way to avoid things like the cold fusion. But I'm sure whoever finds the Higgs using the LHC will be awarded the Nobel 10 years later.

Re:Curious

[pjt33]

I know that, and some of the work for which this year's was awarded was done back in the 60s. But so was Higg's, and he will be the major recipient of the prize if the LHC finds his boson and he lives long enough. It's at least plausible that the first results demonstrating it will be found in two years, in which case the prize could conceivably be awarded in five or six.

Nambu ok, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Nambu ok, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not exactly. The prize was awarded "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature", that is, for realizing that CP-violation can only take place if there are at least three families of fermions.

Cabibbo made a theory of quark flavours with two families (predicting the charm-quark). Kobayashi and Maskawa found out that with two families there is no CP-violation, and that one needs a third quark family. This last reason is the one which the comitee mentions.

Whether Cabibbo should be awarded a price for the prediction of the charm-quark is another story.

Re:Nambu ok, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Am I the only one that thinks

[morgan_greywolf]

[Am I the only one that thinks] sharing prizes on subatomic particles studies is ironic???

Maybe you are, maybe you are not. We won't know until someone observes your post, thus collapsing the waveform...

Not for experimental particle physics.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Bose anyone?

[Geoffrey.landis]

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.)

Yeah, but if the LHC kills us all...

[davido42]

... then this will be the LAST prize in subatomic particle physics! So maybe they're hedging their bets.

IMO, the prizes should almost always be shared. Nobody works in a vacuum* --they are all building on the work of the rest of the community. Seriously, the number of scientists who understand this stuff is vanishingly small*!

* Wow, the comedy just writes itself...

Re:Yeah, but if the LHC kills us all...

[Ortega-Starfire]

How appropriate then that the last prize be awarded to Kobayashi as well, if that no-win scenario takes place.

Re:Bose anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bose had bad luck. He only had one big, Nobel-worthy work (Bose-Einstein statistics).. but it came about during a generation when there were quite a lot of great discoveries being made in Physics. But Raman did get one, so Indian physicists of that generation aren't entirely unrepresented.

Gandhi was as much a given prizewinner as anyone, but his tragic death came too shortly after independence.

Re:Bose anyone?

[evilviper]

The dead scientists can't appreciate the honor, so it makes sense to give it to them while they're alive

I go around giving people preemptive Darwin Awards for just this reason...

Re:Bose anyone?

[oldhack]

Dude, please, no Nobel for crappy stereo.

Re:Bose anyone?

[esonik]

Half of the particles are named after Bose. I think that's a much better deal than getting a price that will be forgotten in a few hundred years.

Gender naming

[mrproper07]

In Romania, all female name end in "A", and all male names don't. In Soviet Romania, name genders YOU.