Hideki Yukawa
Hideki Yukawa was a Japanese theoretical physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1949 "for his prediction of the existence of mesons on the basis of theoretical work on nuclear forces."
Early life and education
Hideki Yukawa was born on 23 January 1907 in Tokyo, Japan, and grew up in Kyoto with two older brothers, two older sisters, and two younger brothers. He read the Confucian Doctrine of the Mean, and later Lao-Tzu and Chuang-Tzu. His father, for a time, considered sending him to technical college rather than university since he was "not as outstanding a student as his older brothers." However, when his father broached the idea with his middle school principal, the principal praised his "high potential" in mathematics and offered to adopt Ogawa himself in order to keep him on a scholarly career. At that, his father relented.Ogawa decided against becoming a mathematician when his high school teacher marked his exam answer as incorrect when Ogawa proved a theorem but in a different manner than the teacher expected. He decided against a career in experimental physics in college when he demonstrated clumsiness in glassblowing, a requirement for experiments in spectroscopy.
In 1929, Ogawa graduated from Kyoto Imperial University, where he was a lecturer from 1932 to 1939. During this period, he was interested in theoretical physics, particularly in the theory of elementary particles. In 1933, he became Lecturer and Assistant Professor of Physics at Osaka Imperial University.
Career and research
In 1935, Yukawa published his theory of mesons, which explained the interaction between protons and neutrons at Osaka Imperial University, and was a major influence on research into elementary particles.In 1938, Yukawa received a doctorate from Osaka Imperial University for his predictions regarding the existence of mesons and his theoretical work on the nature of nuclear forces. These research achievements were the reason he was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.
In 1939, Yukawa was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at Kyoto Imperial University. In 1949, he became a visiting professor at Columbia University, the same year he received the Nobel Prize in Physics—after the discovery by Cecil Powell, Giuseppe Occhialini, and César Lattes of Yukawa's predicted pi meson in 1947. Yukawa also worked on the theory of K-capture, in which a low energy electron is absorbed by the nucleus, after its initial prediction by G. C. Wick.
In 1946, Yukawa founded the journal Progress of Theoretical Physics, and published the books Introduction to Quantum Mechanics and Introduction to the Theory of Elementary Particles.
In 1953, Yukawa became the first Director of the Research Institute for Fundamental Physics, a position he held until his retirement in 1970.
Activism
In 1955, Yukawa joined ten other leading scientists and intellectuals in signing the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, calling for nuclear disarmament.Yukawa was one of the signatories of the agreement to convene a convention for drafting a world constitution; subsequently, a World Constituent Assembly convened to draft and adopt a Constitution for the Federation of Earth.
Personal life and death
In 1932, he married Sumi Yukawa. In accordance with Japanese customs, since he came from a family with many sons—but his father-in-law, Genyo, had none—he was adopted by Genyo and changed his family name from Ogawa to Yukawa. The couple had two sons, Harumi and Takaaki.Owing to increasing infirmity, in his final years he appeared in public in a wheelchair. He died of pneumonia and heart failure on 8 September 1981 at his home in Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, at the age of 74. His tomb is in Higashiyama-ku, Kyoto.
Solo violinist Diana Yukawa is a close relative of Hideki Yukawa.