Val Logsdon Fitch: Unraveling the Mysteries of Time Symmetry
Val Logsdon Fitch (10 March 1923 โ5 February 2015) was an American nuclear physicist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1980, along with James Cronin.
Life and Career
Val Logsdon Fitch was born on 10 March 1923, in Merriman, Nebraska. He served in the United States Army during World War II before attending McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1948. He then went on to earn his master’s degree in physics from Columbia University in New York in 1950 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in New Jersey in 1954.
Fitch conducted his groundbreaking research on CP violation while working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, in the early 1960s. He and Cronin found that the decay of certain subatomic particles called K mesons did not obey the predicted symmetry between particles and their antiparticles, known as CP symmetry. This discovery helped to explain why the universe is made up of matter instead of antimatter, and it opened up new avenues for research in particle physics. He was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Award and Legacy
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1980, along with James Cronin, for their discovery of CP violation, a phenomenon in which the symmetry between particles and their antiparticles is broken. He also received the National Medal of Science in 1985 and the Enrico Fermi Award in 1996.
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