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

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:w00t

[rugatero]

Sure is one ugly woman...

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: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...

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.)

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...