After emerging as a young man from the chaos of World War II in Japan, University of Chicago physicist Yoichiro Nambu found order in the idea that our imperfect world contains deep and hidden symmetries, which await only the right mind to reveal them.
Nambu, 87, was awoken early Tuesday morning with news that he had received the Nobel Prize for physics in recognition of work from the 1960s that many peers described as decades ahead of its time.
He took half of the $1.4 million award, with the rest going to Japanese researchers Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa for their work in predicting a third family of the subatomic particles called quarks.
Nambu, who lived through the aerial firebombing of Tokyo as a young Japanese Army draftee, told reporters he had almost given up on getting the award.
“I’d been told I was on the list (of possible recipients) for many, many years — maybe 30 years now,” Nambu said.
Many researchers said Nambu provided a new perspective that helped guide development of what physicists call the Standard Model — the framework that explains how nature’s fundamental particles behave. He discovered a subatomic principle called spontaneous broken symmetry, which, among other things, explained why some particles are far lighter than others. He also helped found string theory, an effort to understand gravity within the laws of the strange subatomic world.
The man who brought Nambu to America in 1952 as a research associate was Robert Oppenheimer, director of Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study. Oppenheimer also had led the Manhattan Project that resulted in the atomic bombs dropped on Nambu’s homeland during the war. University of Chicago physicist Peter Freund, a friend of Nambu’s, said that link never seemed to be a source of awkwardness for Nambu.
Nambu said he came to the University of Chicago in 1954 because of the “many great names” of physics who were there, including Enrico Fermi, whose secret wartime group at the university had made the first controlled nuclear chain reaction.
Nambu said that although he no longer works full time, he continues to grapple with the implications of the ideas he set in motion nearly 50 years ago.
