Dear Sean,

If you look at the official announcement, you can notice that KM were awarded for their work on ‘CP violation’ not for ‘flavor mixing’. Strictly speaking, as you know, they are two different things even they are intimately related.

Here is the quote:
“for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature”

Best,
Seong-Chan

Increasingly, the Nobel committee is presenting the award to a few token candidates representing a body of new work, while other major contributors are omitted for the arbitrary reason that only three people can receive the award. Thus, Kobayashi and Maskawa are rewarded while omitting Cabibbo; Nambu is praised while omitting Goldstone, Jona-Lasinio; etc. As the size of scientific collaborations (experimental or theoretical) continues to increase, the Nobel committee selections are going to appear increasingly arbitrary/capricious.

The “sad” part is that, in the eyes of the non-experts, three people have been especially promoted to the pantheon of Nobel laureates, and they are fine physicists, but so are their coworkers who were overlooked by the prize committee. For the also-rans, their life work will still be admired by the experts, but it has been relegated to public obscurity

If a major discovery is made at the LHC, which three physicists, out of the thousands who toil on that machine, will get the prize?

“Nambu’s Prize could easily have been shared with Jeffrey Goldstone, another pioneer of spontaneous symmetry breaking.”

If you read the citations and background material carefully, you will note that Nambu is being awarded the Nobel prize for “spontaneous symmetry breaking” in both the ungauged case ["Nambu-Goldstone symmetry realization"], and the gauged case [the "Higgs" mechanism], both of which he worked out and published in 1960-61 [actually he did them in reversed order; first he wrote BCS superconductivity as a non-relativistic field theory and worked out the gauge invariance of the Meissner effect = "Higgs Mechanism" [work redone in the relativistic case by Anderson, Higgs, Brout-Englert, and Guralnick-Hagen-Kibble]. Then he wrote relativistic effective theories [with Jona-Lasinio] and worked out the effects of spontaneous symmetry breaking in the ungauged case, with the resulting massless quasi-particles [Nambu-Goldstone bosons], and in particular with Lurie worked out the low-energy theorems for soft N-G Boson emission, which were the first examples of the “soft pion emission” theorems which are the content of chiral dynamics. What is most amazing is that all this was done in the context of dynamical spontaneous symmetry breaking [ie. the effective quasiparticles are dynamically generated composites, not toy scalar fields inserted by hand, as in all the other contemporary work]. I’m amazed the he could understand the underlying symmetry arguments in such a full dynamical context; his depth of physical insight is truly extraordinary.

“If you read the citations and background material carefully,… ”

I think the point being made is that such careful reading should not be necessary when picking the Nobel winners vs. the ones left out. But this is obviously hard (impossible?) in the modern age when lots of people come up with bits and pieces of an idea simultaneously.

“What is most amazing is that all this was done in the context of dynamical spontaneous symmetry breaking [ie. the effective quasiparticles are dynamically generated composites, not toy scalar fields inserted by hand, as in all the other contemporary work].”

Wow, that is indeed quite remarkable.

I don’t necessarily think that they’re “…judging twenty-first century science with a nineteenth century eye.” The Nobel committee probably looks at it like this: any significant increase in the amount of nobel winners is a “cheapening” of their brand. Nobel winners are considered impressive because they’re rare. There’s something to be said about the kind of cult-like following that the prizes have and it’s natural for them to want to maintain that.

I can’t speak about their choice of splits this year since I’m not on the committee but I do think it’s strange to break up a group of people who made a discovery if they want to fit two accomplishments into one nobel. It sure does sound like they have more people than nobels recently. Maybe their standards for prizes have lessened over the years.

This is why the Higgs, Brout, and Englerts of the world are tying to ignore the GHK team that was first on the mass boson discovery and had the most complete solution. Pretending this GHK team does not exist is the best way to make the Nobel math of 3 work.

Agree with Manny above. PH and EB solved half of the problem – namely massifying the gauge particle. GHK solved an entire problem – massifying and also showing how the deadening hand of the Goldstone theorem is avoided.