doctoral_advisor thesis_year death_date death_place birth_place thesis_title awards fields birth_date known_for image article_title name alma_mater
james rainwater 1954 5 february 2015 princeton , new jersey merriman , nebraska studies of x-rays from mu-mesonic atoms e. wetherill medal -lrb- 1976 -rrb- nobel prize in physics -lrb- o. 1980 -rrb- national medal of science -lrb- 1993 -rrb- lawrence award -lrb- 1968 -rrb- john price particle physics 10 march 1923 discovery of cp-violation val fitch.jpg val logsdon fitch
 val logsdon fitch columbia mcgill university
val logsdon fitch

val logsdon fitch -lrb- march 10 , 1923 -- february 5 , 2015 -rrb- was an american nuclear physicist who , with co-researcher james cronin , was awarded the 1980 nobel prize in physics for a 1964 experiment using the alternating gradient synchrotron at brookhaven national laboratory that proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles .
specifically , they proved , by examining the decay of k-mesons , that a reaction run in reverse does not retrace the path of the original reaction , which showed that the reactions of subatomic particles are not indifferent to time .
thus the phenomenon of cp violation was discovered .
this demolished the faith that physicists had that natural laws were governed by symmetry .
born on a cattle ranch near merriman , nebraska , fitch was drafted into the u.s. army during world war ii , and worked on the manhattan project at the los alamos laboratory in new mexico .
he later graduated from mcgill university , and completed his ph.d. in physics in 1954 at columbia university .
he was a member of the faculty at princeton university from 1954 until his retirement in 2005 .
