Tuesday, October 07, 2008

2008 Nobel Prize in Physics

The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has just been announced within the past 30 minutes.

Yoichiro Nambu, Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, IL, USA

"for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics"

and the other half jointly to

Makoto Kobayashi, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Tsukuba, Japan

and

Toshihide Maskawa,Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University, Japan

"for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature"


The Thomson Reuters forecast for the Physics Nobel prize was completely wrong! :) And so was mine, but I think, in my defense, I didn't predict the graphene discovers will win it this year. I just think that they will win it some time soon, and as the importance of graphene emerges even more, then the discovery will be even more significant.

BTW, it is interesting to note that I highlighted recently issues regarding spontaneous symmetry breaking as the origin of mass. With this Nobel prize, and with the LHC looking for the Higgs, it clearly underlines the importance of the understanding of such symmetry breaking as one of the most fundamental aspect of our universe.

Zz.

2 comments:

bostonian said...

too bad the Nobel committee simply "forgot" about Nicola Cabibbo, who is in fact the real discoverer of the symmetry breaking and quark mixing....

Francesco Mercurio said...

In my personal opinion the Prof. Nicola Cabibbo is a pure theoretical physicist and the his many fundamental contributions in Physics of Fundamental Interactions are the best answear to the "scientific" blindness of the Nobel Laureate Commitee.