Japanese scientist shares 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics for work on neutrinos

The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded Tuesday to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald for their groundbreaking work on subatomic particles known as neutrinos.

Both physicists were rewarded for their experiments which proved that neutrinos, the second most abundant subatomic particles in the universe, after photons, can change identities with the metamorphosis proof that the neutrons have mass.

The revelation has changed the way science views the most intricate aspects of matter and the broader understanding of the universe, with the pairs' contribution perfectly aligned with the categories' parameters concerned with "changes in identity among some of the most abundant inhabitants in the university," according to a statement made by the awarding committee.

Kajita, in the late 1990s hypothesized and presented the fact that neutrinos from the atmosphere switch between two identities on their way to the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan. The detector is a special constructed neutrino observatory located under Mount Kamioka near the city of Hida, in Gifu Prefecture in central Japan.

The observatory was designed specifically to search for proton decay, study solar and atmospheric neutrinos, and keep watch for supernovae in the Milky Way Galaxy, among other functions, according to the observatory's operators.

Meanwhile, Arthur McDonald's team proved that neutrinos from the Sun were not disappearing on their way to Earth, but rather had transformed when arriving to the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, located more than 2,100 meters below the earth surface in Vale Inco's Creighton Mine in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.

The revolutionary findings on neutrino oscillations had laid to rest decades of bemusement on the subject within the physics community, with the two experiments in tandem proving that, in fact, the neutrinos had changed identities and were not massless, as had been the predominant understanding since the 1970s.

The scientific community has been particularly excited by Kajita's and McDonald's findings as it is believed that the new paradigm of understanding will accelerate the unlocking and understanding of the history of the universe, its formation and structure and its eventual demise.

Kajita is the second Japanese to win a Nobel prize this year following Satoshi Omura, who was awarded the Nobel medicine prize with two other people on Monday. He is the 24th Nobel Prize winner born in Japan and he's the 11th to win the Physics award.

Kajita and McDonald will share around 960,000 U.S. dollars in prize money and be inducted into the Nobel laureates hall of fame, which boasts some of science's biggest game changers since 1901, including the likes of theoretical physicist Albert Einstein who gave the world the theory of relativity, Niels Bohr who revolutionized thinking about quantum physics and Marie Curie, who made great advances in the study of radioactivity.

Kajita, who currently directs the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research at the University of Tokyo, on hearing from the committee over the phone that he had jointly won the prize, reacted with astonishment exclaiming that it was, "Kind of unbelievable!" Endi