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.
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.