Satosi Watanabe

Satoshi Watanabe, listed in this atlas under the spelling Satosi Watanabe, was a theoretical physicist, born in Tokyo on 26 May 1910 and died there on 15 October 1993. He graduated in theoretical physics from Tokyo Imperial University in 1933 under Torahiko Terada, was sent by the imperial government to France, where Louis de Broglie encouraged him to study thermodynamics and wave mechanics, studied nuclear theory under Heisenberg in Leipzig from 1937 and stayed with Niels Bohr in 1939. Back in Japan he worked at the Physical and Chemical Research Institute and taught physics at Rikkyo University before leaving for the United States in 1950. He worked on the time reversal of quantum mechanics, pattern recognition, cognitive science and the concept of time, and was the first physicist to claim that quantum probability theory is time-asymmetric. He developed the Double Inferential Vector Formalism, later known as the Two-state vector formalism, and proposed the Ugly duckling theorem. From 1956 he was a researcher at the IBM Watson Laboratory and he taught at Yale University and the University of Hawaii.