Cronin, James W.

Cronin, James W. (Watson) (1931–  ) physicist; born in Chicago, Ill. He worked at Brookhaven National Laboratories (1955–58), then moved to Princeton (1958–71). In 1963 he and Val Fitch collaborated to discover violations of the symmetry principle in the decay of the kaon, a subatomic particle; for this work the two scientists received the 1980 Nobel Prize in physics. He joined the University of Chicago (1971), where he continued his research in elementary particles.