Val Logsdon Fitch - Biography

Biography

Val Fitch was born on a cattle ranch in Cherry County, Nebraska, on March 10, 1923. He was the youngest of three children. His father, Fred Fitch, was badly injured in a horse riding accident and could no longer work on his ranch. Therefore the family moved to the nearby town of Gordon, Nebraska, where he entered the insurance business.

As a soldier during World War II, he was sent to Los Alamos to work on the Manhattan Project. While there he met many of the greats of physics including Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, James Chadwick, Isidor Isaac Rabi and Richard C. Tolman. In the three years he worked there in the lab of Ernest Titterton, he became well acquainted with the techniques of experimental physics.

After the war he was offered a graduate assistantship at Cornell University, but needed to finish his undergraduate degree, which he did at McGill University. For his graduate degree he went to Columbia University, where he worked under Jim Rainwater. For his thesis he designed and built an experiment to measure the gamma-rays emitted from mu-mesic atoms (i.e. atoms in which an electron is replace by a muon).

After obtaining his doctorate his interest shifted to strange particles and K mesons. He took a position at Princeton University, where he spent the next 20 years studying K mesons. Unexpectedly, he discovered that the decay of neutral K mesons did not respect CP symmetry (Simultaneously exchanging left and right and particles and anti-particles). For this discovery he and his student James Cronin received the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics.