James Cronin Biography

James Cronin was an American nuclear physicist who was one of the joint winners of 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics. He was born in the city of Chicago in Illinois but grew up in Dallas, Texas where is father was a professor of Greek as well as Latin at the Southern Methodist University. He studied at the Southern Methodist University and graduated in mathematics and physics before continuing with his education at the University of Chicago. After obtaining his doctorate from the University of Chicago, he started working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and after some time he joined Princeton University as a professor at the insistence of nuclear physicist Val Fitch. It was at Princeton University that Cronin did his most productive work and in collaboration with Val Fitch he came up with the studies that eventually resulted in the discovery of CP violation. Cronin worked for a year in France and then returned to Princeton University to continue on his research on CP violation. He left Princton for University of Chicago and had a fruitful time at his alma mater. He had also spent a year at CERN and worked on neutral pion.