Author: Associated Press
Date: Tuesday, October 14, 1980
Page: ?????
Section: RUN OF PAPER
Two Americans - James W. Cronin of Chicago University and Val L. Fitch of
Princeton University - won the 1980 Nobel Prize in physics today for nuclear
research that contributed to the Big Bang theory of creation.
They were cited by the Swedish academy of Sciences "for the discovery of
violations of fundamental symmetry principles in the decay of neutral K-
mesons." As in the case of previous Nobel prizes this year, the award carries
a cash stipend of $212,000. The chemistry prize also is to be announced today.
Cronin and Fitch, the fourth and fifth Americans to win 1980 Nobel prizes,
made their discovery by studying a new type of elementary particle. They used
a proton accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory where they headed a
research group. Their studies scrutinized the validity of three related
symmetry principles in physics.
"The new truth reached by the discovery of violations of the laws of
symmetry in nature recently also has been incorporated as an important
ingredient in cosmological speculations. The aim has been to try to understand
how a universe, originally very hot and symmetric, could avoid that matter and
antimatter almost immediately annihilated each other. In other words, efforts
have been made to describe how the matter we are made of was once created in a
Big Bang and how it could survive the birth pains," the Academy of Sciences
stated.
"The discovery emphasizes, once again, that even the most self-evident
principles in science cannot be regarded fully valid until they have been
examined in precise experiments," the academy added.
The academy described the work of Fitch and Cronin as pure basic research
without direct practical applications but with great importance for the
understanding of elementary matter and life on earth. The new knowledge
offered by the prize-winners "permits us to make a distinction between matter
and antimatter in an absolute and not only relative way. The left and right
dimensions could then also be given absolute meaning, thus losing the
arbitrariness of definition," the academy said.
"The search for the deeper courses of symmetry violations discovered in
the experiment by Cronin and Fitch is actively pursued at present," the
academy said. "The progress in elementary particle physics during recent years
has created new interesting possibilities."
Fitch, a professor of physics, told a reporter who called him at
Princeton, "I am very pleased indeed, of course."
The American dominance of the Nobel prizes has been marked, especially in
the physics and medicine categories. Since 1975, 12 of the 16 laureates in
physics have been Americans.
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