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WASHINGTON – An American and two Japanese physicists won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for their discovery of tiny asymmetries in nature’s fundamental particles that help explain why our universe exists.
Yoichiro Nambu of the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago will receive half of the $1.4 million prize. The other half will be split between Makoto Kobayashi of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Kukuba, Japan, and Toshihide Maskawa of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University.
The three physicists were pioneers in understanding “broken symmetry,” which explains why the universe can contain life as we know it.
When matter and antimatter collide, they annihilate each other, leaving only radiation. In a symmetrical universe with an equal amount of matter and antimatter, life – if any could exist – would be nasty, brutish and short.
That doesn’t happen because there is a tiny imbalance of one extra particle of matter for every 10 billion antimatter particles, resulting in the matter-dominated universe we live in today.
How exactly this happened is still a mystery. But Nambu, 87, born in Tokyo, was among those who opened up the field to further questions with the discovery of “spontaneous symmetry breaking.”
Nambu’s work, done in the 1960s and 1970s, predicted the behavior of the tiny particles known as quarks and underlies the Standard Model of the universe, which unites three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force and electromagnetic force. The working of gravity, and how it relates to the three other forces, is still a mystery.
Kobayashi and Maskawa predicted there were three families of quarks, instead of the two then known. Their calculations were confirmed by experiments in high-energy physics, leading to the discovery of the six quarks known today.
“It is my great honor, and I can’t believe this,” Kobayashi said, according to the Reuters news service.
