Physics Nobel Prize 2008
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awared to Yoichiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa. I remember studying spontaneous symmetry breaking and the Nambu-Goldstone bosons (for which he won the prize). He was also the originator of the idea of the color flavor for quarks, developing Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). For my Quantum Field Theory class, the professor had wanted us to read Nambu’s original papers (first, second, third). These days, I prefer the two versions that the Nobel Foundation put out – one with lots of pictures, and other other with no pictures.
I also remember studying the CKM Matrix for flavor mixing – that when a single quark decays via the weak force, it doesn’t just turn into one other quark but a mixture of 3 other quarks! The K and M are for Kobayashi and Maskawa. The C is for Nicola Cabibbo.
Since the Nobel prize is only allowed to be given to a maximum of three people in a field for a given year, Nicola Cabibbo and Jeff Goldstone (Masud’s field theory professor) got left out although they had an equal share in the discoveries. This will unfortunately remain one of those controversial prizes. Perhaps they could have split it into 2 years like they did in 1997 and 2001.
