Maskawa, Toshihide

Maskawa, Toshihide,

1940–, Japanese physicist, Ph.D. Nagoya Univ., 1967. Maskawa was a research associate at Nagoya Univ. from 1967–70 and then joined the faculty at Kyoto Univ., where he was appointed emeritus professor in 2003. Maskawa shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics with Makoto KobayashiKobayashi, Makoto,
1944–, Japanese physicist, Ph.D. Kyoto Univ., 1972. Kobayashi taught at Kyoto Univ. (1972–79) and the National Laboratory of High Energy Physics, Tsukuba, Japan (1979–97).
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 and Yoichiro NambuNambu, Yoichiro
, 1921–2015, Japanese-American physicist, b. Tokyo, D.Sc. Univ. of Tokyo, 1952. He studied at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, with Albert Einstein from 1952–54 and subsequently was a researcher and professor at the Univ.
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. He and Kobayashi predicted (1972) the existence of at least three families of quarks (see elementary particleselementary particles,
the most basic physical constituents of the universe. Basic Constituents of Matter

Molecules are built up from the atom, which is the basic unit of any chemical element. The atom in turn is made from the proton, neutron, and electron.
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), the subatomic particles that are the constituents of protons and neutrons, and thereby provided the foundation for the principle of broken symmetry. (Broken symmetry explains the asymmetry in nature known as CP violation, which results in a universe consisting of mostly of matter, instead of equal amounts of matter and antimatter.) The existence of the predicted quarks has since been confirmed in experiments.