Nobel Prize in Physics
The first part of October has always been exciting time for the Physics community and for the scientist in general. That's when Noble Prizes are announced, and each year Nobel Prize serves as a pretty reliable, albeit imperfect, indicator of where the field currently stands or what has been recognized as a seminal achievement form the years past. This year the prize went to Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago for the fundamental contribution to our understanding of Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking, and to Makoto Kobayashi, of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba, and Toshihide Maskawa, of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature. The last half of the 20th century has been characterized by an increasing understanding of how symmetry plays a fundamental classifying role in our understanding of how the world around us works, and the most interesting questions in Physics are those that explore the discrepancy between the underlying symmetry of nature and its apparent absence in what we actually observe. This, in a nutshell, is what it means for a symmetry to be broken. For instance, we strongly believe that all laws of Physics should be the same whether we go up or down, left or right, forward or backward. That is what we mean by living a in a three dimensional space. And yet, on the surface of the Earth, it makes a lot of difference whether we move on the two dimensional surface or try to get off and move upward. Driving 100 km in any direction is not much of an achievement. Many people drive as much in a single day for their commute to work (I do). And yet, moving 100 km upward will take us to the edge of the outer space, and it's a completely nontrivial feat of science and engineering. So we see that on the surface of the Earth the third dimension (up-down) is completely different from the other two. The three dimensional symmetry is broken. The cause behind the breaking of this symmetry is the Earth, or more precisely Earth's gravitational field. For the longest time we believed that this sort of symmetry breaking is due to very special conditions that we have chose on a macroscopic level, and that the fundamental laws of Physics are not susceptible to it. This all changed in the second part of the 20th century when it was discovered that even the most "fundamental" laws of Physics are in fact a broken version of some other laws.
What intrigues me, and what keeps me going in my own line of research, is the idea that all of the particulars of nature, all of the initial conditions that we observe and all of the special and unique natural laws that seem to govern the Universe, are in fact a broken remnant of some vast and awesome symmetry. I believe that some outlines of this symmetry are already manifesting themselves, but a lot more work needs to be invested before a coherent and concrete model can be put forward. Until that happens, I am grateful that the Noble committee has put forward the ideas of broken symmetry back into the Physicists' spotlight.