Thus, Nambu learned to keep his thoughts to himself. This trait served him well later, through years in the army--and perhaps even as a physicist. His originality might come from having to think everything through for himself, from being aware of, but ignoring, ideas in the world outside.
Moving on to a premier college in Tokyo in 1937, Nambu discovered a freer intellectual atmosphere and smart classmates who awed the country boy. Of his courses, physics caused him special trouble: "I couldn't understand entropy and flunked thermodynamics." Yet, possibly inspired by Hideki Yukawa, the pioneer who realized that particles transmit force, Nambu chose to aim for a master's in physics at Tokyo University.
Among his new classmates, he found some underground radicals. Japan was fighting China. "We were told of the victories, " Nambu says, "but these communists somehow also knew about the massacres and defeats." The academic program turned out to be short: the class graduated six months early so that its members could be drafted.
In the army Nambu dug trenches and carried boats. "Physically it was hard," he shrugs, "but inside I was free. As long as you said, 'Yes, sir, yes, sir,' they left you alone." After a year he was assigned to help develop shortwavelength radar. The navy already had such radar, but the army had no confidence in that equipment. Nor was Nambu's team especially successful: "To test our system, I set it up on a hilltop and hired a boat to take a metal rod out into the ocean. You could see it with your bare eyes--but not with our radar."
He was then ordered to steal a secret navy document, a paper on field theory by Sin- Itiro Tomonaga, who was applying his discoveries on particle waves to radar waveguides. (Werner Heisenberg's publications on field theory had arrived from Germany shortly before, after traveling by submarine for a year.) Obtaining these papers--simply by asking a professor--Nambu became acquainted with some of the newest ideas in physics.
Life was quite easy. The unit was housed in a golf club, and romance was budding between Nambu and his assistant, Chieko Hida. For the most part, the war seemed far away. Yet one night Nambu watched a fleet of B-29s fly over Osaka. For a change, they did not drop their bombs on the city but moved on to Fukui. Nambu lost his grandparents; his parents were spared.
After the war, Nambu and Hida married, whereupon he left for Tokyo to take up a long-promised research position. (Hida stayed on in Osaka to look after her mother.) Housing was scarce, and Nambu moved into his laboratory for three years. Gas and electricity were free, and he could bathe in the water basin intended for extinguishing air-raid fires. But his of- ficemate, Ziro Koba, a diligent young man (he once shaved his head for missing a calculation), would come in early and often embarrassed Nambu, who was sleeping across both their desks.
"I was hungry all the time," Nambu says. Finding food took up most of the week. For the rest, he thought about physics, calculating on rolls of cashregister paper. Koba, a student of Tomonaga, kept Nambu informed about the latter's work. A group of solid-state physicists in a neighboring office also provided stimulating company.
All that these researchers knew of scientific developments in the West came from sporadic issues of Time magazine. Later, journals in a library set up by the Occupation forces helped to fill in the gaps. Yet much had to be reinvented by the Japanese physicists. Sometimes they got there first. After moving to Osaka City University in 1949, Nambu published a formula describing how two particles bind, now known as the Bethe-Salpeter equation. Along with others, he also predicted that strange particles should be created in pairs, a discovery usually attributed to Abraham Pais.
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Add CommentIn 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.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere 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.