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 woken up early Tuesday 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.
The exciting news did not disturb the serene manner of Nambu, who lived through the aerial firebombing of Tokyo as a young Japanese army draftee. He told reporters he had almost given up on getting the award so many years after the work that put him in contention.
"I'd been told I was on the list [of possible recipients] for many, many years -- maybe 30 years now," Nambu said at a morning news conference. "I must say I was very surprised when I got the news."
Many researchers said Nambu provided a new perspective that helped guide development of 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.
Nambu's earliest breakthroughs in physics came shortly after World War II, when the American occupational government still banned most physics journals from being imported to Japan, for fear that Japanese scientists might develop military applications.
U. of C. physicist Peter Freund, a friend of Nambu's who wrote about him and other researchers in "A Passion for Discovery," said Nambu's modesty was a key to success.
"He was a full professor in Japan, but he came to the U.S. in 1952 as just a research associate," Freund said. Many academics would have viewed that as an unacceptable demotion, but Freund wrote in his book that Nambu was "an unassuming man of a fatalistic calm."
The man who brought Nambu to America was Robert Oppenheimer, director of Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study, who also had led the Manhattan Project that resulted in the atomic bombs that America dropped on Nambu's home nation during the war. Freund said that link never seemed to be a source of awkwardness for Nambu.
At Princeton, Nambu met Albert Einstein, whom Oppenheimer had tried to protect from such intrusions by junior researchers.
"Einstein was just happy that finally someone had come to talk with him," Freund said.
Nambu said he came to the U. of C. 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.
"I discovered that [the physics department] was much better than I'd thought," Nambu said. "Everybody treated everybody else as members of a big family."
In the early 1960s, Nambu began working on problems of symmetry that arose from his research on superconductivity, the quality of materials that conduct electricity with no resistance.
Much of modern physics involves the study of how symmetry emerges or breaks down in nature. A simple example is the change that occurs when a drop of water becomes a snowflake, said Chris Quigg, a theoretical physicist at Fermi National Laboratory, near Batavia.
"Within the drop, there's perfect symmetry," Quigg said. "It's just water everywhere, with no difference if you look up or down or sideways. But snowflakes are not the same in every direction."
Quigg said Nambu's key insight was seeing how hidden symmetry might govern the subatomic world. Nambu's ideas influenced most subsequent work in particle physics -- including the accurate prediction of a third quark group by Kobayashi and Maskawa. Their work in 1973 helped fill out the Standard Model, which has survived many experimental tests in the decades since.
Tuesday's award brought the U. of C.'s all-time Nobel tally to 82, including 28 Nobels in physics.
Nambu, who still lives in Hyde Park with his wife, Chieko, said although he no longer works full time, he still grapples with the implications of the ideas he set in motion nearly 50 years ago.
"I do hope to do that until I die."
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