Events

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2008 with one half to Yoichiro Nambu "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics," and the other half jointly to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature." Nambu's early work began a "paradigm shift" in particle theory in which we think of the "vacuum" not as a state of absolute nothingness but