Obituary of Yoichiro Nambu

Nambu was many things to me. Teacher, mentor, friend.

First, as teacher he treated all of his graduate students in the same manner, a manner very distinct from what was commonplace among, say, experimental high energy physicists, and today I see it within my present setting. He never had an agenda, a set of tasks his students were to pursue in order to further his own funding let alone reputation. I would say the core of his teaching was “If you are going to make it you are going to have to make it on your own”. That is, formulate a problem you are interested in and wish to solve, then I will help you, but I will not assign a problem to you. And indeed so many young Ph.D.s do their dissertation over and over again because they did it under strict supervision of their advisors and never had a chance to develop their own originality.

As a mentor he was equally strict. He took me and Tom Bell to SLAC one year when he took a sabbatical there. I loved the place and especially the people there. I desperately wanted to get a Post-Doc. It did not happen immediately. Far into the process I went to see Sid Drell to ask if I still had a chance. He told me to go see Nambu and ask him to go see him. I told Nambu this and he said, “I have written my letter. I will do no more.” This was, I believe, a tribute to his credit, to his nobility if you will, that he did not ever want to be a part of the “Ol’e boys club.” Once again, I had to stand on my own. I got the offer and that forever shaped my future.

As to that future, there was a festival at UChicago to honor his birthday (65th I believe). After formal talks etc. there was a formal dinner and guests were asked to offer tributes if they so wished. I don’t remember my exact words but the essence of what I said was something like “When I first went to work with Nambu I thought maybe I had caught him past his prime. He was thinking about things no one else was thinking about, talking about things no one else was talking about. Maybe this was a big mistake on my part.” Amazingly he shook his head as though perhaps in agreement. But then I noted “that was just before he issued his theory of strings and all of a sudden I realized that I was in the presence of sheer genius. " And I admitted openly “I know I will never rise to his level, but I will do what I can and always know that to have been in his presence enriched my life in a manner that I could not ask for more.”

Finally, as friend, it turned out that in the midst of my joy at SLAC my son developed what was then a 50/50 chance of survival disease. Nambu learned of this and then shared with me the pain he had endured when his son Albert had developed a similar life-threatening disease. There was no need for this save his warmth and openness to his humble student.

Years later I was invited together with a group from my present institution to visit Japan to try to set up a research collaboration. I knew he was in Japan at the time so I contacted him and he told me that fortuitously he would be in Tokyo for a meeting just around the time of my trip and so suggested I come a few days early, he would meet me at the airport. The flight was about 6 hours late but there he was, waiting for me. He had set up for us to take the bullet train with a stop at Kyoto, which he insisted I must visit during my stay in Japan. There is a comical aside in that I lugged my bag up a set of stairs only to find that it was the wrong landing, so down we went again and over to where the bullet train was almost ready to depart. We made it.

Once I departed the train in Kyoto he told me to walk down the stairs, take my first right corner, walk a block, then take the next right as well, and there would be the hotel where he had made a reservation for me. The staff spoke no English but there they were, waiting for me because Nambu had alerted them to my arrival.

That was a few years before he was awarded the Nobel. I think, how many men of that caliber care so much about their humble students?

I can only hope he now knows all the secrets of the Universe he tried to understand, in the hands of a Spirit that can be happy that Spririt created Men such as he.

The death notice below was originally published on July 20, 2015 by Physics Today Staff.

Yoichiro Nambu, Nobel-Winning Physicist, Dies at 94
The New York Times

Goodbye Nambu
Asymptotia