Coming as I did from the formerly gray world of newspapers, where design was more a matter of sufficiently breaking up type, I, too, had to gain an understanding of this.
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.
More radical reforms, like breaking up too-big-to-fail financial firms and returning to Glass-Steagall-type restrictions, which are needed to stave off asset bubbles and tame systemic risk, may be politically difficult to implement.