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Home , Yoichiro Nambu

One Hundred Reasons to be a Scientist

THERE IS MUCH TO DO AFTER TWENTYFIVE Yoichiro Nambu Institute Chicago, USA

I grew up in a conservative provincial town in the part of dubbed the Buddhist kingdom. My father had run away from his parents, refusing to carry on their family trade of keeping a store of utensils for Buddhist rituals. He went to , where I was born, to study literature and aspiring to become a writer, but soon he lost everything due to the great earthquake of 1923 that destroyed the capital. So he reluctantly came back to his home town and ended up as a high school teacher. He did not have training in science, but insisted that a writer must know something about all human activities. In my infancy he gave me books and magazines on science for children. Thomas Edison became my hero. During my grade school days I used to visit my grandparents’ home. An uncle of mine had died of tuberculosis there. I suppose he did not get higher education but apparently dabbled in science. I found a catalogue of scientific instruments made by a company © Courtesy of the in Kyoto, well known to this day. I enjoyed going over the pages, and was attracted by a slide rule. My father bought one for me as a New Year’s present. I still have it. One day I also came upon some manuals and parts for radio circuits. The enigmatic diagrams and formulas captured my imagination. I tried hard to decipher them although I had of course no knowledge of electromagnetic theory. Nevertheless I got immense pleasure from guessing this way and that way what these formulas meant. Around that time a radio station opened in our town, but we did not have a radio set. So I spent a summer month building a crystal radio with my uncle’s legacy. An annual nationwide high school baseball tournament was a big event then (it still is), which was broadcast over the radio. I cannot forget the thrill of listening to the final game, a duel between two great pitchers. The game went on for twenty-five innings without a score. (This number will show up again below). It still stands as the longest in the history of the tournament, as somebody told me recently after a Web search. When I was in high school, I again discovered in my grand parents’ home some notes on calculus which had been meticulously taken by another uncle of mine in his college days. I intensely studied them, and got a taste for higher mathematics. A prestigious publisher in Tokyo had started a series of booklets on specialized subjects in various disciplines. They were readily available at local bookstores. My curiosity was aroused by the title of one of them, which read “procession and procession formula” (matrix and determinant). I managed

170 the international centre for theoretical One Hundred Reasons to be a Scientist to buy a copy. Although it became too difficult for me towards the end, I learned, among other things, that Japanese mathematicians in the seventeenth century had developed the theory of determinants. High school physics and mathematics were not so interesting. But I was very pleased with myself when I figured out how the rainbow forms and then was able to calculate its angular size. As the 1930’s advanced and I grew older, life in Japan became more and more unpleasant because of the irrational and oppressive nationalism. Wars and assassinations came one after another. I have fond memories of my college days in Tokyo. The tide of intolerance had not quite reached it yet. It was my first experience in liberal and carefree life, and it was also an escape from threatening reality. The atmosphere of the self-governed dormitories exerted a great influence on the naïve country boy that I was. I acquired many interests. Regarding physics, I learned the ’s way of reasoning by watching my more knowledgeable friends arguing with each other. Still I flunked thermodynamics. I thought it was the most profound and conceptually difficult subject in physics. A math professor gave me high stimulus, both sweet and bitter. An admirer of Poincaré, Galois and Abel, he loved to talk about them during his class again and again, but in the next breath he would scare us saying that you would be nobody unless you accomplished something by the age of twenty-five. There was also a motto going around among army cadets that man’s life is twenty-five. What am I to do? I could not imagine myself five years into the future. In the end, however, I decided to go into physics anyway partly because I thought it was most suitable and challenging to me, and partly because of the recent fame of Yukawa. I was fortunate to have lived through the war years past the age of twenty-five, even profited, in hind sight, by my service in the army radar research, and to have been able to come back to academic life and get initiated into by my office mates, at the very moment when they were working with Tomonaga to develop the theory. So I owe a great deal to my father, uncles, friends and others.

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