Toshihide Maskawa

Toshihide Maskawa was a Japanese physicist who, along with Makoto Kobayashi, developed the theory explaining why some particles exhibit a property called "CP violation," which relates to differences between matter and antimatter. Their work, published in 1973, showed that for certain particles, the laws of physics are not identical when particles are replaced with their antimatter counterparts and left and right are swapped. This discovery was crucial for understanding how our universe evolved to be dominated by matter rather than antimatter. Their insights earned them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2008.