It's That Time of the Year

Nervous days, sleepless nights. That's how it is every year around this time when I'm waiting for the Nobel Prize committee to call and say I've been honored in the Cooking Husband or Safe Driver category. I keep my cell phones charged, I try not to leave the house after dinner, and still, no call. Perhaps if I had gone and actually learned to do something laudable...



But, while waiting for the phone to ring, I checked to see how the selection committee was coming along with their other, less important, categories. Such as, say, physics. This year, the Prize in Physics goes to Yoichiro Nambu (born 1921) of the Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago “for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics” and to Makoto Kobayashi (b. 1944) of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) Tsukuba, Japan, and Toshihide Maskawa (b. 1940) of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University Kyoto, “for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature”.



Ahem. I believe it was the groundbreaking work by our entire class back at Towsontown Junior High School that predicted the existence of three families of quarks. That was back in the days when Steve Allen was popular, and part of his schtick was making odd noises like "Schmock! schmock!" so it was a short leap for us to holler "Quark" and set up in our minds little imaginary families. Messrs. Kobayashi and Maskawa deserve a lot of credit for their work, and you can see how they'd be hanging around the laboratory until all hours, because you know how it goes: You get all excited delving into spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics, and the next thing you know, it's way past dinnertime, the kids are already rearranging their subatomic particles and the Safeway is all out of rotisserie chicken.



That's always a cool thing about the Nobel winners: no matter how brilliant, no matter that they think and work in an intellectual area where I dare not tread, they always have to pose like Gerald Ford on his first day in office, toasting an English muffin, scooping up dog poop from the yard, or dropping the kids off at hockey practice. That way, brains or no brains, we can all say "he is truly one of us."



What I really did in eighth-grade science lab was some rather noteworthy investigation into the magnetic arrangement of iron filings.