Three Japanese origin scientists share physics Nobel
07 Oct 2008
Mumbai: Three Japanese origin scientists, including a Tokyo-born American shared the 2008 Nobel prize for Physics for their discoveries in sub-atomic particles, the Nobel prize committee said in Stockholm.
The three - Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan and Yoichiro Nambu, a Tokyo-born American citizen, were honoured for separate work that dealt with ''spontaneous broken symmetries.''
Nambu, a professor at the University of Chicago, was recognised for his discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in sub-atomic physics. His model unified the smallest building blocks of all matter and three of nature's four forces in one single theory, the committee said.
He will receive half of the 10 million Swedish crown ($1.4 million) prize, while Kobayashi of Japan's High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation and Maskawa of Kyoto University will share the other half.
Their breakthroughs, which predicted the existence of at least three families of sub-atomic quark particles in nature, came in the 1960s and 1970s.
The broken symmetries concealed nature's order under an apparently jumbled surface. "The fact that our world does not behave perfectly symmetrically is due to deviations from symmetry at the microscopic level," the committee said.
Kobayashi said the news came as a shock. "It is my great honour and I can't believe this," he said, in a phone interview broadcast at a news conference.
