Hideki Yukawa

Hideki Yukawa (1949)

Hideki Yukawa ( Japanese 湯 川 秀 樹, Yukawa Hideki ; born January 23, 1907 in Azabu , Tokyo (today: Minato , Tokyo ); † September 8, 1981 in Kyoto ) was the first Japanese physicist to receive the Nobel Prize in 1949 for his prediction the existence of mesons based on the theory of nuclear forces.

Live and act

His father Takuji Ogawa was a geography professor at Kyoto University and the son of a Confucian scholar serving the Tanabe family, and Yukawa and his brothers received lessons in the Chinese classics from their grandfather. Yukawa's mother came from a samurai family (Ogawa) and after the marriage, Yukawa's father, who was originally called Asai, was adopted by the Ogawa family so that it would not die out. Yukawa (who was then called Ogawa) attended high schools in Kyoto. After Yukawa, who turned to physics after a lecture by Nagaoka Hantarō , graduated from Kyoto University in 1929 , he stayed as a lecturer at the university for another four years in the laboratory of Kajuro Tamaki. There he mainly dealt with theoretical physics and in particular with elementary particles .

In 1932 he married Sumiko Yukawa (1910-2006), into whose family he was adopted after his marriage (and took the name Yukawa), and they had two sons, Harumi and Takaaki. At the age of 26 he became a lecturer (and assistant professor) at Osaka University , where he had received his doctorate under Seishi Kikuchi (1938). In 1935 he finally published his theory of nuclear forces through the exchange of mesons ( Yukawa interaction ), which explained the short-range nature of the interaction between protons and neutrons due to the mass of the exchange particles (in this case pions ) ( Yukawa potential ).

Yukawa became a professor at Kyoto University in 1940 and received the Imperial Prize of the Academy of Sciences . In 1943 he received the Japanese Order of Culture . In 1948 he was visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study and in 1949 he was visiting professor at Columbia University . In 1951 he received the distinction as a person with special cultural merits . In 1953 he became the first chairman of the Research Institute for Fundamental Physics (RIFP) founded in 1952, later the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of Kyoto.

He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Paris , was an honorary citizen of Kyoto and a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh , the Indian Academy of Sciences, the International Academy of Philosophy and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences (1949), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1961) and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (Pontificia Academia Scientiarum). In 1955, Yukawa signed the Russell Einstein Manifesto with ten other leading scientists in favor of nuclear disarmament.

He was editor of the journal Progress in Theoretical Physics since 1946 .

miscellaneous

On August 8, 1998, an asteroid was named after Hideki Yukawa: (6913) Yukawa .

In honor of Yukawa, the makers of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine named a spaceship class after him.

Publications

• Yukawa: Introduction to Quantum Mechanics. 1946 (Japanese)
• Yukawa: Introduction to Elementary Particle Theory. 1948 (Japanese)
• Yukawa: On the interaction of elementary particles I. In: Proceedings of the Physico-Mathematical Society of Japan. 3rd Series, Volume 17, 1935, pp. 48-57 (Yukawa interaction)
• Autobiography: Tabibito. A Wanderer. Memories of a Physicist, translated by Erwin Müller-Hartmann . Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1985, ISBN 3804708269

Web links

Commons : Hideki Yukawa  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Information from the Nobel Foundation on the award ceremony for Hideki Yukawa in 1949
• Literature by and about Hideki Yukawa in the catalog of the German National Library
• Hideki Yukawa in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Morris Low, Science and building of a new Japan, Palgrave Macmillan 2005, p. 107
2. ↑ Ex Astris Scientia - Cardassian Ship Classes