16 Facts About Shoichi Sakata

Shoichi Sakata was a Japanese physicist and Marxist who was internationally known for theoretical work on the subatomic particles.

Shoichi Sakata was the eldest of six children of Tatsue Sakata and Mikita Sakata.

Shoichi Sakata became closely acquainted with Kato Tadashi, who would later co-translate Friedrich Engels's 1883 unfinished work Dialectics of Nature into Japanese.

Shoichi Sakata got in to the Kyoto Imperial University in 1930.

When he was a second year student, Yoshio Nishina, a granduncle-in-law of Shoichi Sakata, gave a lecture on quantum mechanics at the Kyoto Imperial University.

Shoichi Sakata became acquainted with Hideki Yukawa and Shin'ichiro Tomonaga, the first and the second Japanese Nobel laureates, through the lecture.

Yukawa published his first paper on the meson theory in 1935 and Shoichi Sakata closely collaborated with him for the developments of the meson theory.

Shoichi Sakata moved to Nagoya Imperial University as a professor in October 1942 and remained there until his death.

Shoichi Sakata reorganized his research group in Nagoya to be administrated under the democracy principle after the War.

Shoichi Sakata then proposed his Shoichi Sakata Model in 1956, which explains the NNG rule by postulating the fundamental building blocks of all strongly interacting particles are the proton, the neutron and the lambda baryon.

Shoichi Sakata's model was superseded by the quark model, proposed by Gell-Mann and George Zweig in 1964, which keeps the U symmetry, but made the constituents fractionally charged and rejected the idea that they could be identified with observed particles.

Still, within Japan, integer charged quark models parallel to Shoichi Sakata's were used until the 1970s, and are still used as effective descriptions in certain domains.

The U symmetry found first in the Shoichi Sakata model gave a guiding principle to construct the quark model of Gell-Mann and Zweig.

The neutrino oscillation phenomena, as predicted by Maki, Nakagawa and Shoichi Sakata, has been experimentally confirmed.

In September 1970, Hideki Yukawa politely wrote to Waller informing him that Shoichi Sakata had been ill when the nomination was written; since then, his condition had worsened significantly.

Yukawa informed Waller that a prize to Shoichi Sakata would have brought him much honor and encouragement.