Val Logsdon Fitch (nonfiction)

Val Logsdon Fitch.

Val Logsdon Fitch (March 10, 1923 – February 5, 2015) was an American nuclear physicist who shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics.

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.

Fitch and co-researcher James Cronin were 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.

He was a member of the faculty at Princeton University from 1954 until his retirement in 2005.

Fiction cross-reference

• Crimes against physical constants
• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles

Nonfiction cross-reference

• CP violation (nonfiction) - n particle physics, CP violation is a violation of CP-symmetry (or charge conjugation parity symmetry): the combination of C-symmetry (charge conjugation symmetry) and P-symmetry (parity symmetry). CP-symmetry states that the laws of physics should be the same if a particle is interchanged with its antiparticle (C symmetry) while its spatial coordinates are inverted ("mirror" or P symmetry). The discovery of CP violation in 1964 in the decays of neutral kaons resulted in the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1980 for its discoverers James Cronin and Val Fitch. It plays an important role both in the attempts of cosmology to explain the dominance of matter over antimatter in the present Universe, and in the study of weak interactions in particle physics.
• James Cronin (nonfiction)
• James Rainwater (nonfiction) - Doctoral advisor

External links:

• Val Logsdon Fitch @ Wikipedia