Japanese Nobel Physics laureate Toshihide Maskawa, an introvert devoted to thinking about the universe, has no passport to go to Stockholm to accept the prize, his wife revealed yesterday.
Maskawa, 68, was one of three physicists to share the prestigious award announced on Tuesday for his groundbreaking work on fundamental particles.
But his wife, Akiko, said that Maskawa does not travel overseas and feels “quite allergic to trying to speak English.”
“And if he needs to go to the award ceremony, he’ll need first to apply for a passport,” she said at her home in the western city of Kyoto, where Maskawa is a professor of theoretical physics at Kyoto Sangyo University.
Maskawa, bespectacled with gray hair, charmed reporters after the prize was announced by trying to conceal his shyness, at one point sobbing and at another moment forcing such a grin that he stuck out his tongue.
He also raised his arms over his head and said to eager reporters: “You’d like me to do this to show I’m happy, right?”
He earlier told reporters abruptly that he was “not that happy” about receiving the Nobel Prize, which will be handed out at a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
“It’s just a society party,” he said.
But he backtracked yesterday.
“I play the devil’s advocate, so when somebody tells me to look left, I look right,” he said with a big smile.
“As a scientist, I feel the most pleased when fellow scientists tell me I was right,” he said. “Of course I get happy when I get compliments.”
Every time Maskawa was invited abroad to receive an award or make a speech, Makoto Kobayashi, who shared the Nobel Prize with him, went instead.
In the 1970s, Maskawa and Kobayashi came up with a theory on why antimatter sometimes does not obey the same rules as matter. They found that nature had three families of quarks, an elementary particle.
The third winner to share the prize was Yoichiro Nambu, a Japanese-born American of the University of Chicago, for his groundbreaking theories on the nature of subatomic particles and how they move.
Laureates receive a gold medal, a diploma and 10 million Swedish kronor (US$1.42 million).
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of