The Washington Post: Val Logsdon Fitch, physics pioneer and Nobel laureate, dies at 91
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Val Logsdon Fitch 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 re…
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science · American nuclear physicist · nuclear physicist · university teacher · physicist · also Val Logsdon Fitch, Val Fitch, Val L. Fitch, Fitch
Born 10 March 1923 · Died 5 February 2015 · Q206499
23 published statements · 0 followers
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The Washington Post: Val Logsdon Fitch, physics pioneer and Nobel laureate, dies at 91
Died 2015-02-05.
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Published “Global variation in copy number in the human genome” in Nature — cited 3,431 times.
Published “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” in Science — cited 2,703 times.
Published “Narcolepsy in orexin Knockout Mice” in Cell — cited 2,632 times.
Published “Two-dimensional detector software: From real detector to idealised image or two-theta scan” in High Pressure Research — cited 4,270 times.
Won National Medal of Science (1993).
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Fitch became a founding member of the World Cultural Council and received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement
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Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics — for the discovery of violations of fundamental symmetry principles in the decay of neutral K-mesons.
Awarded Nobel Prize in Physics (1980).
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Won John Price Wetherill Medal (1976).
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And in 1976 he married Daisy Harper Sharp, thereby acquiring two stepdaughters and a stepson
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Published “Toward Defining the Course of Evolution: Minimum Change for a Specific Tree Topology” in Systematic Zoology — cited 5,346 times.
Awarded Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award (1968).
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The John Price Wetherill Medal in 1976 and the National Medal of Science in 1993
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Published “Construction of Phylogenetic Trees” in Science — cited 2,470 times.
That it explained why the universe is largely made of matter and not antimatter
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And a Member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1966
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Joined the physics faculty at Princeton University, where he spent the rest of his career
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Writing his thesis on "Studies of X-rays from mu-mesonic atoms"
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Fitch married Elise Cunningham, a secretary who worked in the laboratory at Columbia
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The youngest of three children of Fred Fitch, a cattle rancher, and his wife Frances née Logsdon, a school teacher
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Born 1923-03-10.
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