Hideki Yukawa
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.030881
It’s the birthday of Hideki Yukawa (湯川 秀樹), who was born in 1907 in Tokyo. Yukawa studied physics at Kyoto University, which he returned to after serving as a professor at Osaka University. In 1935 he published a theory that could account for the interactions between protons and neutrons in terms of a hypothesized particle, which he called the meson, of mass between that of the electron and the proton. Two years after the discovery of mesons in 1947, Yukawa became the first Japanese recipient of a Nobel prize in physics -- or any other field. Like Richard Feynman, Yukawa did not presume that nature should conform to humans’ notions of beauty and simplicity. He wrote: “Nature creates curved lines while humans create straight lines.”
Date in History: 23 January 1907
