The Nobel Prize in Physics 1980
Awarded on: 1980-10-14
"for the discovery of violations of fundamental symmetry principles in the decay of neutral K-mesons"
Affiliations:
- Princeton University – Princeton, NJ, USA
Val Logsdon Fitch
Born: 1923-03-10 in Merriman, NE, USA
Gender: male
Field: American nuclear physicist
Biography
Val Logsdon Fitch was an American nuclear physicist who, with co-researcher James Cronin, was awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics for a 1964 experiment using the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory that proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles. Specifically, they proved, by examining the decay of K-mesons, that a reaction run in reverse does not retrace the path of the original reaction, which showed that the reactions of subatomic particles are not indifferent to time. Thus the phenomenon of CP violation was discovered. This demolished the faith that physicists had that natural laws were governed by symmetry.