Two Japanese scientists and a Tokyo-born American shared the
2008 Nobel Prize for physics for helping explain why the universe
is asymmetrical and thus fit for life, the prize committee
said.
The Nobel committee lauded Yoichiro Nambu, now of the University of
Chicago, and Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan for
work that helped show why the universe is made up mostly of matter
and not anti-matter via processes known as broken symmetries.
"The fact that our world does not behave perfectly symmetrically is
due to deviations from symmetry at the microscopic level," the
committee said.
This broken symmetry allowed particles of matter to outnumber
particles of anti-matter.
This is lucky for all living things - because if the universe were
symmetrical, anti-matter would be constantly meeting matter, and
exploding.
The work, done in the 1960s and 1970s, predicted the behaviour of
the tiny particles known as quarks and underlies the Standard
Model, which unites three of the four fundamental forces of nature:
the strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force and electromagnetic
force, leaving out gravity.
"Professor Nambu laid a really theoretical foundation for modern
particle physics," Sakue Yamada, emeritus professor of the
University of Tokyo, told Kyodo news.
Nambu also influenced the development of quantum chromodynamics,
which describes some interactions between protons and neutrons,
which make up atoms, and the quarks that make up the protons and
neutrons.
Shared prize
He shared half of the 10 million Swedish crown ($1.4 million) prize
with Kobayashi of Japan's High Energy Accelerator Research
Organization and Maskawa of Kyoto University.
Kobayashi and Maskawa predicted there were three families of
quarks, instead of the two then known.
Their calculations played out as predicted in high-energy
particle physics experiments and there are now six known types of
quarks - up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top.
Kobayashi said the news of his Nobel prize came as a shock. "It is
my great honor and I can't believe this," he said.
Maskawa said he was not surprised.
"There is a pattern to how the Nobel prize is awarded," he was
quoted as saying by Kyodo.
"I am very happy that Professor Yoichiro Nambu was awarded. I
myself am not that happy."
A surprised Nambu greeted reporters and photographers at his
three-story brick home.
"I don't know about the money yet," Nambu, 87, said.
Physicists are now searching for the spontaneous broken symmetry,
the Higgs mechanism, which threw the universe into imbalance at the
time of the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at the European
Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, in Switzerland will be
looking for the Higgs particle when they restart the collider in
spring 2009.
The prize, awarded by the Nobel Committee for Physics at the Royal
Swedish Academy of Sciences, was the second of this year's crop of
Nobel prizes.
The prizes are given annually for achievements in science, peace,
literature and economics.
The prizes bearing the name of Alfred Nobel were first awarded in 1901 in accordance with the 1895 will of the Swedish dynamite millionaire.
