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.
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.
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.