Hantaro Nagaoka
| Hantaro Nagaoka | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
August 19, 1865 Ōmura, Nagasaki |
| Died | December 11, 1950 (aged 85) Tokyo |
| Nationality | Japan |
| Fields | Physics |
| Notable students | Kotaro Honda, Hideki Yukawa |
Hantaro Nagaoka (長岡 半太郎 Nagaoka Hantarō?, August 19, 1865 – December 11, 1950) was a Japanese physicist and a pioneer of Japanese physics during the Meiji period.
Nagaoka was born in Nagasaki, Japan and educated at Tokyo University. 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.
Physicists in 1900 had begun to consider new models for the structure of the atom. The recent discovery by J. J. Thomson of the negatively charged electron implied that a neutral atom must also contain an opposite positive charge. In 1903, Thomson had suggested that the atom was a sphere of uniform positive electrification, with electrons scattered through it like plums in a pudding, giving rise to the term plum pudding model.
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