I am studying the history of Modern Physics and Yang-Lee earned their Nobel the next year after the Cobalt experiments. I am familiar with the chronology, but am not clear what those findings meant to the physics community to warrant such recognition for two relatively' unknown physicists.
Other household names had to wait decades for more seemingly significant work.
So can someone clarify what their work meant to the eventual development of the Standard Model?
This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-03-24 04:15 (UCT), posted by SE-user Ronald Yu