Work on broken symmetry garners Physics Nobel
By Ivan Oransky
This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
Three men who study broken symmetry -- the phenomenon that "conceals nature’s order under an apparently jumbled surface," according to the Nobel Foundation -- have won the Nobel Prize in Physics: Yoichiro Nambu, of the University of Chicago; Makoto Kobayashi, of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Tsukuba, Japan; and Toshihide Maskawa, of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan.
Broken symmetry has become an important underpinning of particle physics. You can read more about Kobayashi and Maskawa's work here.
Check back with SciAm.com later for more detailed coverage. In the meantime, read our In-Depth Report on the Nobels.
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