Takaaki Kajita worked in physics at a period when the field was still deciding what counted as an answer.
Takaaki Kajita was born at Higashimatsuyama in 1959. His recorded nationality is Japan. He was educated at Kawagoe High School and Saitama University.
Twentieth-century science was collaborative, expensive and political: the questions were pursued by teams, and the answers had consequences that reached well past the laboratory.
The institutions that housed his research were Institute for Cosmic Ray Research and University of Tokyo, where the work centred on physics.
Takaaki Kajita is associated first and foremost with neutrino experiments at the Kamioka Observatory – Kamiokande and its successor, Super-Kamiokande. In physics the decisive move is usually not the theory but the apparatus built to test it.
The Japan setting is not incidental. National academies, funding and language decided which findings travelled and which stayed local, in this period as in ours.
Formal recognition came in the shape of the Nobel Prize in Physics (2015).
The measure that matters is durability. Results that survive re-examination become the floor of a discipline, and it is on that floor that everything afterwards is built.
Takaaki Kajita is still working, and the final assessment of his contribution has not been made - the ordinary condition of a living scientist.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Physics — 2015
- Held posts at Institute for Cosmic Ray Research and University of Tokyo
- Educated at Kawagoe High School, Saitama University and University of Tokyo
- Fields of research: physics
