Through the analysis of certain reactions that violate basic symmetry rules involving elementary particles, physicist James W. Cronin and his colleague, Val Logsdon Fitch, in 1964 showed the violation of symmetry and conservation laws to be more far-reaching than earlier physicists had suspected. Cronin interpreted his observations of CP (charge conjugation and parity) violations as "a cryptic message from nature that will be deciphered." For their discovery, Cronin and Fitch were jointly awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in physics.

James Watson Cronin was born in Chicago, Illinois, on September 29, 1931, to James Farley Cronin and the former Dorothy Watson. The family later settled in Dallas, Texas, where the elder Cronin taught Greek and Latin at Southern Methodist University (SMU). The younger Cronin attended local public elementary and high schools before enrolling as a physics major at SMU in 1947. He received his B.S. four years later, then began graduate studies at...