The winners of the 20008 Nobel Prize in Physics were announced today, and the honor didn’t just go to one man (or woman). Instead the prize was shared by three different researches, all collaborating on something called “symmetry breaking.” The big winners were Yoichiro Nambu at Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, Makoto Kobayashi at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan, and Toshihide Masukawa at the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP) in Kyoto University, Japan. Their research is said to have led to “a deeper understanding of our universe.”

How exactly? Well apparently the best way to explain “symmetry breaking” is to look at the example of the snowflake. James Trefil explains:

Both the hydrogen and oxygen molecules are quite symmetric when they are isolated. The electric force which governs their actions as atoms is also a symmetrically acting force. But when their temperature is lowered and they form a water molecule, the symmetry of the individual atoms is broken as they form a molecule with 105 degrees between the hydrogen-oxygen bonds. When they freeze to form a snowflake, they form another type of symmetry, but the symmetry of the original atoms has been lost. Since this loss of symmetry occurs without any external intervention, we say that it has undergone spontaneous symmetry breaking.

Got all that?

You know, as cool as symmetry breaking sounds, I really feel like the Hadron Collider guys got screwed, don’t you?