Professional Luncheon,
Toshihide Maskawa,
2008 Physics Nobel Prize Winner

The speech and Q & A will be in Japanese with English interpretation.

*Please note this luncheon has been rescheduled from Nov. 25 to Nov. 26.

Does a Japanese education stifle creativity? Certainly not in the rarefied field of particle physics, where bold and original work by three Japanese scientists earned this year's Nobel Prize. All three -- Toshihide Maskawa, Yoichiro Nambu (now a United States citizen) and Makoto Kobayashi -- are theorists who made daring predictions about the wondrous world of elementary particles and the strange concepts of matter and antimatter.

Maskawa will come to the FCCJ to explain their work in layman's terms and how he feels about winning the Nobel Prize. He will also discuss scientific education in Japan and the future direction of his own research.

Maskawa, 68, teamed with Kobayashi when both were at Kyoto University in the early 1970s to develop a theory that partly explains why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe (a condition that results from what is known as charge-parity (CP) violation) and to predict that there had to be at least 6 types of the strange particles known as quarks, even though only 3 were known at the time. Their ground-breaking paper, "CP Violation in the Renormalizable Theory of Weak Interaction," appeared in 1973 in Progress of Theoretical Physics and is still one of the most frequently cited high energy physics papers of all time. Over the course of his career as a professor at Kyoto University, Maskawa saw experimentalists gradually confirm all of their predictions. He is now a professor at Kyoto Sangyo University.

Known for his sense of humor as well as his continuing curiosity about the natural world, Maskawa is a speaker not to miss.

Sandwich Plate: Tuna, egg, tomato, bacon & lettuce on rye with tomato & pickles.
Hot Plate: Baked chicken with avocado dip & sliced almond, seasonal salad & bread.

Toshihide Maskawa