Particle Physicists Share the Physics Nobel

somegeekynick writes "The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has been jointly awarded to Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago 'for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics,' and Makoto Kobayashi of the KEK lab and Toshihide Maskawa of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, both in Japan, 'for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.'"

Re:w00t

[TheNecromancer]

How do you know they are "boys"? Japanese names are hard (for non-Japanese) to determine the gender just by reading them.

Sexist!

Re:Curious

[j-beda]

Nobel prizes (at least in physics - I don't follow the others as much) often tend to lag the discoveries for a fairly large number of years, and they try to go for things that are widely accepted. Fr example Einstein got it in 1921 for work published in 1905 on the Photoelectric Effect, Leggett's 2003 prize was for work done in the 1980s I think, and Kilby's prize in 2000 was for the integrated circuit obviously done more than a few years earlier. If the LHC has any Nobel prize fallout, it will not hit for at least a decade.

Re:Curious

[pjt33]

I know that, and some of the work for which this year's was awarded was done back in the 60s. But so was Higg's, and he will be the major recipient of the prize if the LHC finds his boson and he lives long enough. It's at least plausible that the first results demonstrating it will be found in two years, in which case the prize could conceivably be awarded in five or six.