The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics to Professor James W. Cronin , University of Chicago , USA and Professor Val L. Fitch , Princeton University , USA, for the discovery of violations of fundamental symmetry principles in the decay of neutral K-mesons .
Symmetries play a great role in many sciences and also in many other areas.
This year's Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded for an unexpected discovery in an experiment devoted to a critical scrutiny of the validity of three related symmetry principles. These are of ureas importance to the formulation of fundamental laws of Nature. The discovery was made at Brookhaven National Laboratory by a research group led by James Cronin and Val Fitch who also initiated the search. Using the proton accelerator AGS a beam of neutral elementary particles was produced. Their radioactive decay in flight was recorded and measured with great precision.