Bringing Dramatic Stories into Science | UTOKYO VOICES 027

Super-Kamiokande is the world’s largest underground water Cherenkov detector, designed to examine and elucidate the properties of neutrinos. Professor Vagins has been at the forefront of enhancing its capabilities and developing new observational techniques. One such initiative has been to add a water-soluble gadolinium compound to Super-Kamiokande to make possible the detection of neutrinos from past supernovas without creating new experimental devices.

His flexible thinking is by no means unrelated to his upbringing. His grandmother on his mother’s side was a classical pianist who had two radio shows. While the world of classical music was still biased against jazz, she threw herself into jazz, performing under a different name.

Vagins’s father was an engineer and his mother an English teacher and editor. He was raised in a home filled with books and music. From his childhood, he read a wide range of books, from the many scientific books on hand, to science fiction, mysteries and classics of English and American literature. He says, “I was the kind of kid who always had a book with him, even on our way somewhere.”

Partly influenced by his father, he took an interest in science early on, building radio-controlled cars when he was in elementary school. By the time he was 10 years old, he says he wanted to be a scientist.

After reading a book by Richard Phillips Feynman, who received a Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, his interests turned decisively to particle physics. “In my first year at university, I had the opportunity to meet and talk with Feynman, who was something of a god-like figure to me. To this day, other researchers are jealous that I got to talk with him,” he says, laughing.

“One of my goals is to be the first to observe the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background (DSNB), generated by all the supernova explosions that have occurred since the universe began, using Super-Kamiokande loaded with gadolinium (SK-Gd).” That would mean no less than the acquisition of new knowledge by humans about the history and evolution of the universe.

In the United States, once you become a graduate student, you are on a first name basis with the professors, and they treat you as a colleague. Vagins thinks it would be good for Japanese students to be more open and frank as well.

During his seven years as a student, he watched a play every week. He tells his students, “It’s important that presentations have a story to them like a song or play where you present an interest-arousing introduction and then, while delving into your themes, build up to belting out your main theme and tie it all neatly together at the end.” Of course, he tries to work that kind of progression into his daily lectures as well so as not to bore his listeners.

Vagins says his mission is to communicate the joy of learning. He declares, “If a class isn’t fun, there’s no point to it.”