And the Nobel prize in Physics 2008 goes to...Yoichiro Nambu (1/2), Makoto Kobayashi (1/4), and Toshihide Maskawa (1/4) "for discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics" and "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature." I'm buried under work but if I can claw myself out of it I'll write a post about their work. In the meantime, here is the Nobel's scientific background.
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This is being sung in my household by a parade of boys carrying Baby Z. around and singing to him. I offer it to you, well, because I find it awfully amusing. Perhaps you can guess what's on the homeschool agenda here at the farm lately.
Today the 2008 Nobel Prize winners were announced for physics. It was given to three physicists who described something called symmetry breaking.
for all practical purposes we can do most physics under the assumption that space-time is locally flat
This post started out as a response to a question in the comments of my last post on groupoids.
Dave, this is wonderful news, and a richly deserved award!
About 10^100 years ago, I was a graduate student in Yoichiro Nambu's theory group at the U of C. From my personal graduate-student experience, I can attest that Nambu is not only a brilliantly creative theorist, he is also a wonderful teacher and an outstanding administrator.
The sole injustice of the Nobel Award is that Nambu might reasonably have been awarded it twenty years ago.