Val Fitch
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Val Logsdon Fitch
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1980
Born: 10 March 1923, Merriman, NE, USA
Died: 5 February 2015, Princeton, NJ, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
Prize motivation: "for the discovery of violations of fundamental symmetry principles in the decay of neutral K-mesons."
Prize share: 1/2
Work
For a long time, physicists assumed that various symmetries characterized nature. In a kind of "mirror world" where right and left were reversed and matter was replaced by antimatter, the same physical laws would apply, they posited. The left-right symmetry had already been proven violated when, in 1964, Val Fitch and James Cronin discovered that the matter-antimatter symmetry is violated when the neutral K-meson decays. Their experiment also proved that symmetry does not apply during time reversal: reactions going backward in time are not identical to those going forward.
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Nobel Prizes 2018
Their work and discoveries range from cancer therapy and laser physics to developing proteins that can solve humankind’s chemical problems. The work of the 2018 Nobel Laureates also included combating war crimes, as well as integrating innovation and climate with economic growth. Find out more.
