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."According to the citation, as early as 1960, Nambu apparently formulated his mathematical description of spontaneous broken symmetry in particle physics. What does that even mean? It must be Nobel Prize-winning mad science talk. You're blowing my mind with your brilliance, Professor Nambu.
Nambu, who was born in Japan, moved to the United States in 1952 and is a professor at the University of Chicago, where he has worked for 40 years. He became a U.S. citizen in 1970. Kobayashi, 64, works for the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, or KEK, in Tsukuba, Japan. Maskawa, 68, is with the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University in Japan.
The trio will share the 10 million kronor (US$1.4 million) prize, a diploma and an invitation to the prize ceremonies in Stockholm on December 10. Sweet.
