WASHINGTON — A Japanese-American theorist whose work helped explain how the cosmos came into being and two Japanese theorists who predicted the existence of a family of exotic particles called quarks will share the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics, the Swedish Nobel Foundation announced Tuesday.
Yoichiro Nambu, 87, a Tokyo-born physicist at the University of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi Institute, will receive half of the $1.4 million prize.
The other half of the prize will be split between Makoto Kobayashi, of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Kukuba, Japan, and Toshihide Masakawa, 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 one another, leaving only radiation. In a symmetric 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.
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 other three forces, is still a mystery.
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