Cronin, James Watson
Cronin, James Watson,
1931–2016, American nuclear physicist, b. Chicago, Ph.D. Univ. of Chicago, 1955. Cronin and co-researcher Val Logsdon FitchFitch, Val Logsdon,1923–2015, American nuclear physicist, b. Merriman, Neb., Ph.D. Columbia, 1954. During World War II Fitch was drafted into the army and worked on the detonator for the atomic bomb at Los Alamos.
..... Click the link for more information. were awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics for a 1964 experiment conducted at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, N.Y., that proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles. Specifically, they showed, by examining the decay of K-mesons, that a reaction run in reverse does not merely retrace the path of the original reaction, which showed that the reactions of subatomic particles are not indifferent to time. Their discovery of what is known as the Fitch-Cronin effect also helped explain why matter-antimatter collisions in the aftermath of the big bang did not destroy all matter in the universe (see also cosmologycosmology,
area of science that aims at a comprehensive theory of the structure and evolution of the entire physical universe. Modern Cosmological Theories
..... Click the link for more information. ). With Alan A. Watson he later (1992) proposed a project to study high-energy cosmic rays that became the Pierre Auger Observatory, Mendoza prov., Argentina. After working at Brookhaven and then Princeton (from 1958), Cronin spent most of his career (from 1971; emeritus from 1997) at the Univ. of Chicago.