Yoichiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa all worked on what is known as symmetry breaking.

ECONOMIST: The 2008 Nobel science prizes

After eight years of struggle, the so-called Standard Model of particle physics was revised (by Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa, of Nagoya University), to accommodate the asymmetry.

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Dr Kobayashi and Dr Maskawa, who were at Japan's High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation and Kyoto University respectively, described a type of symmetry breaking that predicted two new families of quarks, a sort of subatomic particle whose simplest members are the ingredients of the protons and neutrons that form atomic nuclei.

ECONOMIST: The 2008 Nobel science prizes