Val Fitch
| Val Logsdon Fitch | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
March 10, 1923 Merriman, Nebraska |
| Died | February 5, 2015 (aged 91) Princeton, New Jersey |
| Fields | Particle physics |
| Institutions | |
| Alma mater |
Columbia McGill University |
| Thesis | Studies of X-rays from Mu-Mesonic Atoms (1954) |
| Doctoral advisor | James Rainwater |
| Known for | Discovery of CP-violation |
| Notable awards | E. O. Lawrence Award (1968) John Price Wetherill Medal (1976) Nobel Prize in Physics (1980) National Medal of Science (1993) |
Val Logsdon Fitch (March 10, 1923 – February 5, 2015) was an American nuclear physicist who, with co-researcher James Cronin, was 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.
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. He was a member of the faculty at Princeton University from 1954 until his retirement in 2005.
Val Logsdon Fitch was born on a cattle ranch near Merriman, Nebraska, on March 10, 1923, the youngest of three children of Fred Fitch, a cattle rancher, and his wife Frances née Logsdon, a school teacher. He had an older brother and sister. The family farm was about 4 square miles (10 km2) in size, and was about 40 miles (64 km) from the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre. The ranch was a small one; his father specialized in raising breeding stock. Soon after his birth, his father was badly injured in a horse riding accident and could no longer work on his ranch, so the family moved to the nearby town of Gordon, Nebraska, where his father entered the insurance business. It was here that he attended school, graduating from Gordon High School in 1940 as valedictorian.
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