Every year the award of the NobelPrize for Physics goes through afamiliar pattern -a few days' heigh-tened speculation, a warm congra-tulation and, more often than not, atrailing dispute. This year has been noexception. The three new laureates,whose predictions and concepts onsymmetry breaking have become cor-nerstones of the Standard Model,had long been tipped to win at somepoint. Makoto Kobayashi, 64, of theKEK lab, and Toshihide Maskawa,68, of the University of Kyoto, bothin Japan, share one half of theSwKr 10m (about ￡800 000) prize fortheir work in 1972 on the mechanismof broken symmetry, which led to theprediction of a new family of quarks.Yoichiro Nambu, 87, of the Univer-sity of Chicago in the US, wins theother half of the prize for realizing in1960 how to apply spontaneous sym-metry breaking to particle physics.
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