Physics Nobel to Particle Theory

Kobayashi and Maskawa I've heard about. I was kind of surprised they hadn't already won a nobel( everyone I've heard of must be famous... :p)
The CKM mixing matrix is what I know them for best. It tells you the likelihood for one kind of quark to turn into another kind of quark. For quarks, they don't change into each other that often, so it is nearly unitary(Cabibbo came up with the original 2D matrix, which I guess was not good enough for a Nobel).
I work with neutrinos, and the neutrino mixing matrix is very not unitary, kind of the opposite, with a bunch of angles. But neutrino mixing is exciting because it tells us neutrinos have mass. I'm not sure exactly what is exciting about quark mixing, except that it happens, which you wouldn't necessarily expect. But I am a relative particle physics neophyte, and I'm sure someone else can explain it better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa_matrix --Wikipedia on CKM

The news team on the main radio station here in Stockholm rang up a couple of the winners this morning, just after the prize had been announced. Unfortunately they forgot to find out beforehand if the recipients could speak a word of English (the evidence, what felt like an eternity of embarrassed silence on the other end of the line, suggests not).

Cabibbo's work is basically phenomenology. He "explained" strangeness changing weak decays by postulating that normal and strange quarks were a mixed state with a mixing angle now known as the Cabibbo angle. KM went further, extending this to a matrix that included the (then undiscovered) charm quark. That last step makes it theory rather than phenomenology.

Side pedagogical comment: This use of a matrix is akin to the idea that first led Heisenberg to formulate a quantum mechanics consisting of a matrix of elements that were, in principle, measurable as a solution to the problem of how to calculate transition rates in atoms. As with atomic and nuclear theory, the next step is to calculate those matrix elements from first principles.

Nambu. Well, Nambu is long overdue. Seriously, Chad, are you saying that there are no instances of spontaneous symmetry breaking in condensed matter or AMO physics? On the particle physics side, one needs to look no further than the Higgs mechanism, which has gotten a bit of press lately....

Nambu. Well, Nambu is long overdue. Seriously, Chad, are you saying that there are no instances of spontaneous symmetry breaking in condensed matter or AMO physics?

No, I'm saying that I don't know enough about the subject to say anything sensible about it at eight o'clock in the morning.

Aaah yes, the announcements of the Nobel Prize (Prizes, in this case) for Physics. The time of year when a former physics major (me) is amazed by how little he knows anymore, and when mathematicans/statisticians (I am the latter) have to endure the myth that Alfred Nobel didn't set up a prize for mathematics because his wife had an affair with some mathematician. Sigh.
Congratulations to the winners, thanks for this and all the other posts.

> Kobayashi and Maskawa I've heard about. I was kind of
> surprised they hadn't already won a nobel( everyone I've
> heard of must be famous... :p)

Nambu is the Nambu of Nambu-Goldstone particles which are bosons that appear in spontaneously broken symmetries. I'm also a bit surprised Nambu didn't have one yet, but then again there are people that I think deserve/d one that have never received the honor (e.g. Dyson, the group of Wilkinson, Dicke, Peebles, et. al., among a few others).

@Dean. The rumour you quote is false (Nobel wasn't married). Sadly, there's no Nobel prize in Mathematics because Nobel didn't think of mathematics as a science. There's no Nobel prize in statistics because it isn't a science :-).

On the other hand, there's an Abel prize for mathematics, funded by Norway; the winners so far are really great.

Do you have to live in a suburb and commute to a downtown campus to be eligible for the Abel prize in mathematics? ;-)

That was a quasi-rhetorical question, Chad. I'd really like to see a post about spontaneous symmetry breaking on the AMO side of the physics world. My knowledge is limited to the nuclear and particle side of it.

So, Chad, care to explicate some "instances of spontaneous symmetry breaking in condensed matter or AMO physics? "

When I was in grad school, the chairman who took full credit for the textbook that we coauthored (and later took credit for the Teacher's Guide which I solely authored) told me that Alfred Nobel was angry at Mathematicians and at Astronomers because his wife had an affair with M. G. Mittag-Leffler, mathematician and amateur astronomer. Only when I came to doubt everything that said Chairman ever told me did I do some fact checking, and, sure enough, that's "urban myth."

The St.Andrews University bio begins: "Gösta Mittag-Leffler's father was Johan Olof Leffler while his mother was Gustava Wilhelmina Mittag. The reader will have noticed that Gösta Mittag-Leffler had a surname which combined both his mother's name Mittag and his father's name Leffler so might suppose that when his parents married they combined their names; however this was not so. Gösta's mother took the name Gustava Wilhelmina Leffler on her marriage and when their first child Gösta was born, he took the name Gösta Leffler. It was not until Gösta Leffler was a twenty year old student that he decided to add "Mittag" to his name. This was a clear indication of his feelings for his mother and for his grandparents on his mother's side...."

Abel Prize
The Abel prize is a new mathematics prize of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, dedicated to the memory of Niels Henrik Abel (1802-1829) on the occasion of the bicentenary of his birth. It is modeled after the Nobel Prize, and developed from a proposal by the mathematics department at the University of Oslo in fulfillment of a request formulated by the Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie towards the end of the 19th century.

The Abel Prize has been awarded annually beginning in the year 2003, as summarized in the following table.[truncated]

"The rumour you quote is false (Nobel wasn't married)"
I wasn't clear about that, I know it was false, so called it a rumor.
Thanks for the support on the statistician line :-(
All those years studying measure theory, analysis, and mathematical statistics were wasted, is that your point? :0

Nambu is one of the true giants in the field. I've been complaining for years that he clearly deserves a Nobel Prize, since his work arguably applies to a wider variety of real physical systems than anyone else's. He explained that spontaneous symmetry breaking is associated with a light excitation, which plays a role in everything from chiral symmetry breaking in QCD to superconductivity to sound waves in a solid to the Higgs mechanism.

He was the first to propose that quarks had some sort of color charge. He also made some of the earliest correct progress toward understanding confinement in QCD in the 70s, along with 't Hooft and Mandelstam (which we still don't have a full quantitative understanding of).

He also was the first to write down a theory of relativistic strings, which became the basis of modern string theory.

this is far enough outside my area of physics, that I can't say anything sensible

What!? You can't carefully explain any and all aspects of areas of physics remote from your specialty at the drop of a hat?

signed, the mineralogist who is asked to explain dinosaur minutia to small children...

Wow! I didn't think that I would be able to make a perfect guess for the Physics prize this year. I am not a physicist, let alone an expert in particle physics. (I was a physics major, though.) I was more confident in my guess for the Medicine/Physiology prize.

Even though I named those three as possible winners, I didn't think it was likely that they will all win in the same year. I just wanted to name Nambu, as well as Kobayashi-Maskawa to increase my chance of guessing someone right. Also, I wanted to name as many Japanese scientists as possible, because I'm Japanese. :)

If you had asked me several months ago, I would have named Totsuka and McDonald for neutrino oscillations. That was a relatively new and very big discovery in physics. But Totsuka passed away in July and I thought they wouldn't award for neutrino oscillations this year.

I am happy that Nambu finally won this year. As ignorant as I am, it seems he made a couple of contributions that can be considered for the Nobel Prize. But it took so long, perhaps because somehow Nambu's works were not ideal matches for the Nobel Prize? Take the spontaneous symmetry breaking for instance. It is general and important idea, but in the context of the standard model, it is important because it lead to the Higgs mechanism. But there are too many people that can get credit for the Higgs mechanism and the Higgs boson is not even found yet. Perhaps, they figured that they should go ahead and award Nambu for spontaneous symmetry breaking, because it is after all more general concept and Nambu is not exactly young.

But it makes me think that prizes are irrelevant to the science. The importance of Nambu's work does not depend on the Nobel Prize.

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