Editor's note: This story was originally posted in the February 1995 issue, and has been reposted to highlight the long intertwined history of the Nobel Prizes in Scientific American.

I first saw Yoichiro Nambu almost 10 years ago, from the back row of a graduate seminar in physics at the University of Chicago. A small man in a neat suit, he was sketching long, snaking tubes on the blackboard. Sometimes he said they were vortex lines, found in superconductors; other times he called them strings, connecting quarks. Mystified, and yet fascinated by a bridge between such disparate realms, I later asked him to be my thesis adviser.

Face to face, Nambu was still hard to understand. I was clearly not the first to try. Bruno Zumino of the University of California at Berkeley once recounted his own attempts: "I had the idea that if I can find out what Nambu is thinking about now, I'll be 10 years ahead in the game. So I talked to him for a long time. But by the time I fi- gured out what he said, 10 years had passed." Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., explains: "People don't understand him, because he is so farsighted."

Nambu was the first to see that when a physical system such as a superconductor --or an ocean of quarks--defies the symmetry imposed by physical laws, a new particle is born. Along with Moo-Young Han, then a graduate student at Syracuse University, he proposed the existence of gluons, the objects that hold quarks together. He also realized that quarks act as if they are connected by strings, an idea that became the foundation of string theory. "Over the years," remarks Murray Gell- Mann of the Santa Fe Institute, "you could rely on Yoichiro to provide deep and penetrating insights on very many questions."

The roots of Nambu's originality may lie in a singular childhood in prewar Japan. Born in Tokyo in 1921, he was two when the city was destroyed by an earthquake. (He still has a vague recollection of flames.) Kichiro Nambu, his father, had run away from home to attend university and there had met his bride, Kimiko. The earthquake forced him to return to his hometown of Fukui, near Kyoto, with his wife and young son.

The prodigal was forgiven (although his wife never was). Retaining traces of defiance, Kichiro Nambu became a schoolteacher and built his house on the outskirts of town--an act that was later to save him from Allied bombs. From Tokyo he had brought back an eclectic library. Browsing there, his growing boy learned of ideas that allowed him to flee, at least mentally, the excruciating regimen at the local school.

Fukui, in those days, prided itself on having the most militaristic school in Japan. The boys dressed in scratchy army uniforms and were taught to march, shoot and salute. "If you didn't see a senior boy and so didn't salute him, he would punch you out," Nambu recalls. "You had to keep one eye on every person." At 4:00 A.M. in midwinter, he would walk a mile to school to learn Samurai sword fighting, barefoot on bare floors in unheated halls. To the frail child, school proved as trying as, later, the real Imperial army.

Nor did the school neglect the mind. Heroic deeds-- notably, that of a schoolteacher who died saving the emperor's picture from a fire--embellished the curriculum. Nambu was protected from such teachings by his father's antiestablishment diatribes. Yet they also prevented him from fitting in. "I had a longing to be like the other boys," he smiles ruefully. As he grew, he came to realize that his father's opinions were dangerous in an increasingly warlike Japan.

1 Comments

1. 1. galaxy 05:23 AM 1/4/09

   In this article Yoichiro Nambu explains how the principle of symmetry may result to the creation of an exhange subatomic particle or force. The principle of symmetry thus blends the relativistic and the quantum platforms, as in both cases forces turn out to be but the effects of the alteration between equivalent possibilities or probabilities.
   
   There appears to be a homology between the principle of equality of the theory of relativity and the law of quantum entanglement. According to the equality principle an observer does not distinguish between two systems in a state of balance, such as between the weight of an object counteracted by the earths resistance, and an accelerating force in empty space counteracted by the inertia of the accelerated mass (Relativity, by Albert Einstein, 1920).
   
   Similarly, in quantum entanglement, an observer does not distinguish between the two frames of reference at either side of a mirror. As the observer always notices his mirror-image when looking through a mirror, he cannot assess whether he is seated in the real or the reflected world. Therefore the connection between symmetrical counterparts remains unbroken while jumping into or out of a mirror.
   
   Yet with respect to the principle of indeterminacy relating does not necessarily imply acting. Because of the spontaneous symmetry breaking the definition of a frame of reference causes the alignment of the contents of that frame. But that does not reduce the uncertainty, as different observers can choose different frames and no one can hold the other is wrong.
   
   Consequently the violation of the symmetry may be attributed not to the alteration of the intrinsic nature of an object itself, but rather to the altered properties of the relevant frame of reference: The inversion of the deflection of a reflected beta particle, with respect to the parity symmetry violation, may be due to the inversion of the properties of the intercepting magnetic field. The fact that the asymmetries do not cancel out, according to the charge-parity (CP) symmetry violation, further indicates that a frame of reference may behave as a multiple mirror.
   
   The symmetric relation of matter and antimatter depends both on opposite mass-energy values and opposite time directions. Therefore the essential balance of the universe is unshaken by the phenomenal prevalence of matter or antimatter either by the apparent preference of a direction of the arrow of time, as such distinction is a fact (or an artifact) of the observation.

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