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October 7, 2008
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A History of Nobel Physicists from Wartime Japan

Nobel laureate Yoichiro Nambu co-authored this piece about the most trying years of Japan's history, as two brilliant schools of theoretical physics flourished

By Laurie M. Brown and Yoichiro Nambu

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In the same year he and Tomonaga hosted an international conference on theoretical physics in Tokyo and Kyoto. Fifty-five foreign physicists attended, including Oppenheimer. It is said that Oppenheimer wished to visit the beautiful Inland Sea but that Yukawa discouraged him, feeling that Oppenheimer would find it too upsetting to see Hiroshima, which was nearby. Despite their lifelong immersion in abstractions, Yukawa and Tomonaga became active in the antinuclear movement and signed several petitions calling for the destruction of nuclear weapons. In 1959 Leo Esaki, a doctoral student at the University of Tokyo, submitted a thesis on the quantum behavior of semiconductors, work that eventually led to the development of transistors. He would bring home a third Japanese Nobel in physics, shared with Ivar Giaever and Brian D. Josephson, in 1973.

One wonders why the worst decades of the century for Japan were the most creative ones for its theoretical physicists. Perhaps the troubled mind sought escape from the horrors of war in the pure contemplation of theory. Perhaps the war enhanced an isolation that served to prod originality. Certainly the traditional style of feudal allegiance to professors and administrators broke down for a while. Perhaps for once the physicists were free to follow their ideas. Or perhaps the period is just too extraordinary to allow explanation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

LAURIE M. BROWN and YOICHIRO NAMBU often collaborate on projects involving the history of Japanese physics. Brown is professor emeritus of physics at Northwestern University and has turned his interests in the past two decades to the history of physics. He is the author or co-author of eight books on the subject. Nambu is professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. He is responsible for several key ideas in particle theory and has received the Wolf Prize, the Dirac Medal, the National Medal of Science, the Order of Culture (from the Japanese government) and numerous other awards. Nambu wrote for Scientific American in November 1976, on the confinement of quarks.

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