The Nobel Prize for Physics 2008

For every yin, there’s a yang

But am glad that sort of slipped

For here we are

Instead of none.

We largely thrive on our perceived sense of symmetry — where one part of a whole is roughly repeated, either continuously around — like in daisies, starfish — or on each side — like the wings of many kinds of butterflies. We have also formed a strong preference for pairs: spoon-fork, mortar-pestle, beer-nuts. That is the world familiar to us. But what if you were told that this symmetry of the familiar would not be here to be enjoyed if this symmetry had not been broken or is being broken all the time? 

Deep in the world of the very small that makes up all things — if there were equal amounts of one kind of “stuff” and its opposite, they would cancel each other out in a pretty lavish cosmic puff. Technically, “stuff” in its very fundamental building blocks (atoms and what is inside atoms) is called “particle” in physics. Thus, it follows that “non-stuff” is “anti-particle.” But the fact that we are here means something happened that accounted for more “stuff” than “non-stuff.” In fact, scientists have come up with a ratio: one EXTRA stuff for every 10 billion non-stuff that has made the world we hold dear, what it is.  

The first two Nobel Prize winners for Physics this year are 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, Japan. They were each given a quarter of the prize for explaining how there is more “stuff” now than” non-stuff” by assuming the existence of six quarks (the particles inside protons and neutrons and so far the littlest thing in nature) when only three at that time were known and proven by experiments. Their predictions of the other three quarks were confirmed by later experiments. How nature, through its mathematical language, configures its “brokenness” and why it automatically happens when there are six quarks, are the mysteries that science has yet to unravel.

The other half of the Nobel for Physics award went to Yoichiro Nambu from the Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, IL, USA “for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics.” This is not the same broken symmetry that accounted for “more stuff” than “non-stuff” previously mentioned. This is about pointing out that there are important consequences to matter when symmetry is not wholly respected. I can only explain “not wholly” by an illustration: think of an upright stick, unsupported. In that moment before it falls, the symmetry of all the possible directions it could fall exists until the moment it finally falls. When that happens, the direction is set. That is the moment of spontaneous broken symmetry. Esoteric as it may seem, this has proven to be useful in explaining principles relevant to technology like superconductivity and magnetism. This idea may also shed more light, more details on what holds the protons and neutrons together in the nucleus, why they do not fly apart and thus, form stuff like us. This idea of Nambu is what also led another physicist Peter Higgs to come up with an idea of a yet theoretical particle which other scientists called Higgs which gives mass to particles. This particle is the object of the search of the biggest scientific instrument in the planet (27 kilometers in circumference!) located in Switzerland — the Large Hadron Collider — which was supposed to start last September but was halted till next year by technical problems.

Knowing these ideas that won the Nobel for Physics this year will not increase your salary, lower fuel prices or make your love life bloom. It will not help you mend that quarrel with a friend or make the next mortgage payment. But you will remember it when you have your next encounter with symmetry — whether in butterfly wings or in a work of art — and you will know that you are here because nature itself found a way to break its own rule.

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