'The Nobel Prize is a social phenomenon and while it is not a research activity, I will go to accomplish that phenomenon,' he told reporters.

The bespectacled, grey-haired physicist - one of three to share the prestigious award - denied being shy, although he blushed and giggled at times during a press conference at The Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan.

'I am not a person who becomes nervous when something happens. As a physicist, you argue with another by trying to point out that he's wrong and you're right,' said Mr Maskawa, 68.

Mr Maskawa's wife said last month that he does not travel overseas and feels 'quite allergic to trying to speak English.'

Mr Maskawa, a professor of theoretical physics at Kyoto Sangyo University, initially told reporters that he was 'not that happy' about receiving the Nobel Prize, but later backtracked, saying he was glad to receive the compliment.

In the 1970s, Mr Maskawa and Makoto Kobayashi came up with a theory on why antimatter sometimes does not obey the same rules as matter. They found that nature had three families of quarks, an elementary particle.

The third winner to share the prize was Yoichiro Nambu, a Japanese-born American of the University of Chicago, for his groundbreaking theories on the nature of subatomic particles and how they move.

When asked what he wanted to do in future, Mr Maskawa revealed fierce ambition.

'I don't want to produce work that is very hip, but I would like to do something very big, something very important that occurs once in a hundred years. I want to take a gamble, even if it means I could fail,' he said.

Nobel laureates receive a gold medal, a diploma and 10 million Swedish kronor (S$2.14 million). -- AFP