Two Japanese scientists and an American will share the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2008. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded one half of the prize to Yoichiro Nambu, of the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, for discovering spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics. The other half of the prize goes to Makoto Kobayashi, with High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), in Tsukuba, Japan, and Toshihide Maskawa, with the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP) at Kyoto University, for discovering the origin of the broken symmetry that predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.

Yoichiro Nambu will receive half of the $1.3 million prize. Dr. Nambu, who was born in Tokyo in 1921, suggested back in the 1960s that some symmetries in the laws of nature might be hidden or “broken” in actual practice. Physicists explained that Nambu’s discovery is definitely true, as broken symmetries unify three of the four fundamental forces of nature and appear to explain why the universe was not annihilated shortly after the Big Bang by the mutual antagonism of matter and antimatter. Nambu described spontaneous broken symmetry, which “conceals nature’s order under an apparently jumbled surface,” according to the Nobel committee. Nambu’s work helps to inform the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which describes the behavior of elementary particles and three of the four fundamental forces that govern nature (gravity is not yet one of them).

The two Japanese who will share the other half of the prize, "explained broken symmetry within the framework of the standard model but required that the model be extended to three families of quarks." The academy particularly added that it was only in recent years that scientists have been able to confirm the explanations that Kobayashi and Maskawa proffered in 1972. According to The Academy, their spontaneous broken symmetries differ from the ones described by Nambu but are just as useful.