Makoto Kobayashi
Banquet speech
Makoto Kobayashi’s speech at the Nobel Banquet in the Stockholm City Hall, 10 December 2008.
Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is great honor for Toshihide Maskawa and me to accept the Nobel Prize in Physics, and we wish to express our sincerest gratitude to the Royal Academy of Science and the Nobel Foundation.
It is a pity that Prof. Yoichiro Nambu was not to attend this ceremony. I am greatly honored to share the Nobel Prize with him. When I entered graduate school, he was already an eminent scholar. I remember studying his theory most intently. My first research subject was on chiral symmetry, which was the direct application of Nambu’s theory for which the Prize has been awarded.
Both Maskawa and I graduated from and earned our PhDs at Nagoya University. At that time, the theoretical particle physics group of Nagoya University was conducting unique research under the mentorship of Professor Shoichi Sakata. Both of us learned a great many things from Prof. Sakata and his group.
The paper on CP violation coauthored with Maskawa was written when we were both doing research at Kyoto University. We are grateful for the support accorded to us by our colleagues at the University.
Many thanks also go to our colleagues who participated in the experiments for verifying our model. In particular, I am personally grateful to the members of the KEK B-factory and Belle Group with whom I have had the privilege of working for many years.
CP violation is an intriguing subject. A fundamental question is why the Universe is made of matter. CP violation holds the keys to solving this problem. In spite of more than 40 years of effort in theoretical and experimental, studies, however, matter dominance of the Universe still remains an open question. I hope to continue pursuing this subject with my colleagues.
Thank you very much for your attention.
Nobel Prizes and laureates
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