Two Japanese and American win physics Nobel

By Niklas Pollard

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Two Japanese scientists and a Tokyo-born American shared the 2008 Nobel Prize for physics for helping explain why the universe is asymmetrical and thus fit for life, the prize committee said on Tuesday.

The Nobel committee lauded Yoichiro Nambu, now of the University of Chicago, and Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan for work that helped show why the universe is made up mostly of matter and not anti-matter via processes known as broken symmetries.

"The fact that our world does not behave perfectly symmetrically is due to deviations from symmetry at the microscopic level," the committee said. This broken symmetry allowed particles of matter to outnumber particles of anti-matter.

This is lucky for all living things -- because if the universe were symmetrical, anti-matter would be constantly meeting matter, and exploding.

The work, done in the 1960s and 1970s, predicted the behaviour of the tiny particles known as quarks and underlies the Standard Model, which unites three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force and electromagnetic force, leaving out gravity.

"Professor Nambu laid a really theoretical foundation for modern particle physics," Sakue Yamada, emeritus professor of the University of Tokyo, told Kyodo news.

Nambu also influenced the development of quantum chromodynamics, which describes some interactions between protons and neutrons, which make up atoms, and the quarks that make up the protons and neutrons.

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