The Tohoku ILC Planning Office (Director: Prof. Atsuto Suzuki) was created by the Tohoku ILC Promotion Council to help make the International Linear Collider a reality, and their latest initiative was to put together a booklet of messages from 10 Nobel Prize winners about the ILC. Within, the winners have written about the necessity of the ILC project, and their hope that the Japanese government will host the project. It will be delivered to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe next month.

Appearing in its pages are seven foreign scientists, including Dr. Barry Barish, professor emeritus at California Institute of Technology, who won the prize this year for his work in gravitational waves and who is also deeply connected to the ILC project. There are also messages from 3 Japanese scientists, including well-known neutrino scientist Dr. Masatoshi Koshiba, special professor emeritus at Tokyo University.

Dr. Barish wrote, “The ILC possesses immense scientific potential, and I believe that it is the most important particle physics project in the world.” He called on Japan to realize the project: “I hope you take this once in a millennium chance to host the project.”

Preparations to make the book started in autumn of 2017. There are the letter responses from the Nobel Prize winners to Director Suzuki, Japanese translations, and also links to videos online that the scientists prepared. Five hundred copies each of the complete version and a truncated version were made.

In January 2018, the Federation of Diet Members for the ILC (Chair: Hon. Takeo Kawamura) will present the booklet to PM Abe along with an activity report of the Tohoku ILC Planning Office.

Prof. Suzuki said, “I’m so appreciative that I got so many responses. I hope to tell the Japanese government that this is how much the world expects of Japan because of all we’ve done to bring about the ILC.”

Along with Dr. Barish and Dr. Koshiba, the following scientists are in the booklet:

Burton Richter
Steven Weinberg
Sheldon Glashow
Jerome Isaac Friedman
David Gross
Gerard ‘t Hooft
Masatoshi Maskawa
Makoto Koshiba