Three scientists win 2008 physics nobel prize jointly

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will award the Nobel Prize in Physics to an American and two Japanese scientists jointly for the year 2008. One-half of the prize will go to Yoichiro Nambu, of the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, for discovering “spontaneous broken symmetry” in subatomic physics.

Yoichiro Nambu, 87, of the University of Chicago, won half the $1.4 million prize for mathematical work he did nearly a half-century ago.

Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan shared the other half for a 1972 theory that forecast the later discovery of a new family of subatomic particles.

Nambu will receive US $650,000, while the other two Japanese physicists, Makoto Kobayashi from High Energy Accelerator Research Organization and Toshihide Maskawa from the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP) at Kyoto University, will split that sum, taking about $325,000 each. Yoichiro Nambu, an 87-year-old scientist actually hails from Japan and has been living in the US since the early 50s.

The Japanese-born Nambu moved to the United States in 1952 and is a professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, where he has worked for 40 years. He became a U.S. citizen in 1970.

Kobayashi, 64, works for the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, or KEK, in Tsukuba, Japan. Maskawa, 68, is a physics professor at Kyoto Sangyo University in Japan's ancient capital of Kyoto. He also teaches at Nagoya University, Japan.

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