Хантаро Нагаока: Пионер японской физики

Japanese physicist

Hantaro Nagaoka (長岡 半太郎) was a Japanese physicist and a pioneer of Japanese physics during the Meiji period.

Nagaoka was born in Nagasaki, Japan on August 19, 1865 and educated at the University of Tokyo. After graduating with a degree in physics in 1887, Nagaoka worked with a visiting Scottish physicist, Cargill Gilston Knott, on early problems in magnetism, namely magnetostriction in liquid nickel. In 1893, Nagaoka traveled to Europe, where he continued his education at the universities of Berlin, Munich, and Vienna, including courses on Saturn's rings and a course with Ludwig Boltzmann on his Kinetic Theory of Gases, two influences which would be reflected in Nagaoka's later work. Nagaoka also attended, in 1900, the First International Congress of Physicists in Paris, where he heard Marie Curie lecture on radioactivity, an event that aroused Nagaoka's interest in atomic physics. Nagaoka returned to Japan in 1901 and served as professor of physics at Tokyo University until 1925. After his retirement from Tokyo University, Nagaoka was appointed a head scientist at RIKEN, and also served as the first president of Osaka University, from 1931 to 1934. His granddaughter was pianist Nagaoka Nobuko.

Nagaoka later did research in spectroscopy and other fields. In 1909, he published a paper on the inductance of solenoids. In 1924, he achieved the first successful synthesis of gold, produced from mercury by neutron bombardment. In 1929, Nagaoka became the first person to describe meteor burst communications. Nagoka also did early research on earthquakes, from the 1900s to the 1920s, building upon works published Europe; "One used the principle of elasticity studies against the background of the current that succeeded in France in the first half of the 19th century. The other defined potential functions and explained phenomena from continuous equations of the nature of waves against the background of new currents that emerged in Britain or Germany from the mid 19th century onwards."

For his lifetime of scientific work, Nagaoka was granted the Order of Culture by the Japanese government in 1937. The Nagaoka crater on the Moon is named after him.