Some reminiscences from a long friendship: Table 1.

Abstract

1. My first encounters with Yoichiro Nambu When I was in my first year of graduate studies, our department organized the first Nobel Symposium in physics in the spring of 1968. Essentially all the leading physicists in particle physics were there, and for a young student it was a great time to see and listen to all those famous scientists. The meeting later became very famous for Abdus Salam’s contribution [1], which led to his Nobel Prize. One of the speakers was Yoichiro Nambu. He talked about infinite-component field theories [2], a subject that is now solidly forgotten. I was in a small room in the back recording the sessions but could follow the talks, even though I did not understand much. I could see, however, the respect that the other speakers showed to him. In the fall of 1969 I visited my advisor who was on sabbatical in Austin for a few months. Nambu came there to give a talk and he then lectured about his factorization of the Veneziano Model amplitudes. This was certainly a subject I was beginning to be drawn to. In the summer of 1970 I went to a summer school in Copenhagen, mainly because Nambu was going to talk about dual models as it was announced. This was now the subject I had been starting to work on, not telling my advisor. Nambu did not make it there. Much later he told me that his car had broken down on his way to Chicago to go to Copenhagen. However, his preprint [3] for the meeting had arrived and it was distributed among the participants. This is the preprint in which he suggested the action for the bosonic string which came to be called the Nambu–Gotō action. In the preprint he dared to be braver than in an ordinary paper and there were lots of interesting ideas. He was even comparing the string to DNA at the end of the preprint. It eventually became a rarity and I used to keep it in a box in the attic of our department until someone cleaned out all my boxes of old preprints. The Nambu paper was the only one I really missed.