[1]: 633  After graduating with a degree in physics in 1887, Nagaoka worked with a visiting Scottish physicist, Cargill Gilston Knott, on early problems in magnetism, namely magnetostriction in liquid nickel.

In 1904, Nagaoka proposed an alternative planetary model of the atom in which a positively charged center is surrounded by a number of revolving electrons, in the manner of Saturn and its rings.

However this explanation did not account for important aspects of radioactivity such as its random nature and the high energy of alpha particle emission.

[10] Nagoka also did early research on earthquakes, from the 1900s to the 1920s, building upon works published Europe; "One used the principle of elasticity studies against the background of the current that succeeded in France in the first half of the 19th century.

The other defined potential functions and explained phenomena from continuous equations of the nature of waves against the background of new currents that emerged in Britain or Germany from the mid-19th century onwards.