Person in history
Val Logsdon Fitch
Val Logsdon Fitch, American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (born 1923)
Life at a glance
- Died
- 2015 · February 5
Their story
Who they were
Val Logsdon Fitch was an American nuclear physicist who, with co-researcher James Cronin, was awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics for a 1964 experiment using the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory that proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles. Specifically, they proved, by examining the decay of K-mesons, that a reaction run in reverse does not retrace the path of the original reaction,
Early life
Early life Val Logsdon Fitch was born on a cattle ranch near Merriman, Nebraska , on March 10, 1923, the youngest of three children of Fred Fitch, a cattle rancher, and his wife Frances née Logsdon, a school teacher. [ 1 ] He had an older brother and sister. [ 2 ] The family farm was about 4 square miles (10 km 2 ) in size. [ 1 ] The ranch was small; his father specialized in raising breeding stock. [ 3 ] Soon after his birth,
Why this date
Val Logsdon Fitch appears on our February 5 calendar for 2015 as a death entry.
Sources
Cite this page
“Val Logsdon Fitch”, What's On This Date, https://whatsonthisdate.com/app/people/val-logsdon-fitch, accessed October 26, 2026.
Cite the underlying source as well — the source links above go to the record this entry is adapted from.
Questions about Val Logsdon Fitch
When did Val Logsdon Fitch die?
February 5 2015.
Who else was born on this day?
The date page lists everyone we hold for that calendar day.
Text adapted from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 4.0 and from Wikidata (CC0). Images come from Wikimedia Commons; credit and licence are shown with each image. Editorial entries are © What's On This Date. Sources & licensing · How this site works.