Val (Logsdon) Fitch

Nuclear physicist, born in Merriman, Nebraska, USA. He became interested in physics when, as a US army serviceman, he was sent to work on the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, NM, in the early 1940s. He studied at McGill and Columbia universities, then joined Princeton University, where he did important work in particle physics. He shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with James Cronin in 1980 for their discovery of the violation of fundamental symmetry in certain subatomic processes.

Val Logsdon Fitch (born March 10, 1923) is an American nuclear physicist. A native of Merriman, Nebraska, he graduated from McGill University with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1948 and was awarded a Ph.D.

Fitch and co-researcher James Watson Cronin were awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics for a 1964 experiment 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 merely retrace the path of the original reaction, which showed that the reactions of subatomic particles are not indifferent to time.

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