Val Logsdon Fitch

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 fundamental symmetry principles and are not indifferent to time. The finding demolished physicists' faith that natural laws were governed by symmetry, and earned them the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics. Fitch died February 5, 2015.