Yes, winning that prize was a wonderful culmination to a life of creative work. By Mr. Yoichiro Nambu at the University of Chicago. For personal reasons, Mr. Nambu was unable to go to Stockholm to accept the prize. Instead, the Swedish Ambassador to the United States came to Chicago and presented the prize to him here. My husband, Courtenay Wright, is a professor of physics at the University of Chicago and a member of the Fermi Institute (it was Enrico Fermi who brought Courtenay to Chicago as a young post-doc). I always find it exciting to tag along to physics events. The work they do is exciting and stimulating; even if I don't understand a great deal of it, the parts I do understand stretch my mind in wonderful ways.
At the December 10 ceremony, they hired the Millar Brass ensemble to play the heraldic trumpets used in Stockholm. They showed a film of the Stockholm ceremony, where everyone has to dress in white-tie or ball gowns, and then the ambassador gave Mr. Nambu his medal and Mr. Nambu explained spontaneous broken symmetry, for which he received the prize, to the audience.
If you want to hear the speech, or at least the Millar Brass, you can do so here:
After the ceremony, I came home to the quotidian, the bills, the ills, but I still see a faint glimmer of gold, not from the prize, but of the reaches of the human mind that inspired it. It's one of the things that will help carry me until the sun comes out. What's helping you through these difficult days?
