United States
Val Logsdon Fitch
said
At any one time there is a natural tendency among physicists to believe that we already know the essential ingredients of a comprehensive theory.
— Nobel Prize Autobiography (1981).
Val Logsdon Fitch
American physicist
- Fame54.8
- Momentum1.0
- Academics rank#124
Source-basedFalling
- Fame54.8
- Momentum1.0
- Academics rank#124
- Wikipedia779
Lived 1923–2015, aged 92United States
Summary
Updated 2026-06-09
He shattered one of physics' deepest assumptions: that the universe treats time symmetrically. The 1964 experiment that won him the Nobel showed subatomic particles don't simply retrace their steps when a reaction runs backward.
Biography
About
Fitch was born on a cattle ranch near Merriman, Nebraska, on March 10, 1923. Drafted during World War II, he worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico. He later graduated from McGill University and completed his PhD in physics at Columbia University in 1954. That same year he joined the faculty at Princeton, where he would remain until retiring in 2005. In 1964, working with James Cronin at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, he examined the decay of K-mesons and discovered CP violation — proof that certain subatomic reactions violate…
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Falling54.8
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Momentum1.0
Historical22.5
Source confidence60.0
Completeness70.0
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- WikidataHigh confidencewikidata · wikidata.org
- WikipediaHigh confidencewikipedia · en.wikipedia.org
- Pantheon 2.0High confidencedatabase · pantheon.world
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