For their contributions to the understanding of symmetry breaking in particle physics, three theorists have been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded half the prize to the University of Chicago’s Yoichiro Nambu “for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics.” The other half is awarded jointly to Makoto Kobayashi of KEK, Japan’s high-energy accelerator research organization in Tsukuba, and Toshihide Maskawa of Kyoto University “for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.”
All three laureates were born and educated in Japan. But Nambu, born in Tokyo in 1921, is a generation older than Kobayashi and Maskawa, who were born in the early 1940s. And unlike them, Nambu has spent most of his career in the US, having left war-ravaged Japan in 1952...
