IDEA & ISAAC: Femto-Essays

Hans Svensson (1935–2011)

2012-01-26T17:17:00.003+09:00

On January 23, 2012, I received an email message with an attachment from my former coworker Pedro Andreo in Stockholm. The attachment was a PDF file of the latest issue of European Medical Physics News [1], in which the report of interview with him [2] and a page in memory of Hans Svensson [3] were contained. Pedro is one of two authors who wrote about memories of the Swedish radiation physicist Svensson on that page.

Searching on the Internet, I found the report "Hans Svensson — In memoriam" [4] written in Swedish. According to the report, Svensson died on December 7, 2011, after a short illness. He was born on March 18, 1935, and began his academic career as a student in Lund in 1956. In 1963, he came to Umeå as a medical physicist and received his doctorate there in 1970 in the subject of radiation physics. In 1982, he became full-time professor of radiation physics associated with the mission of an operation manager, a position he held until his retirement in 2000. During his career, he had significant international commitments and received a number of prestigious awards. He has been active professor emeritus at Umeå University since 2000.

Pedro praises Svensson's work done as the Chairman of Report Committee for ICRU Report 35 [5] by the words "probably his greatest single achievement" [3]. I learned Svenssons's name well before the publication of this report, probably by ICRU Report 21 [6], which was the earlier version of ICRU REport 35 with an essentially same title as that and contained seven papers of Svensson's group in its list of references.* I talked with Svensson twice, once on a day of the International Conference on Radiation Research held in Tokyo in 1979 and next in his office at IAEA in May 1989 (the above photo was taken on the latter occasion). Both our meetings were of a short time, but I vividly remember his kindness. Indeed, it was he who gave me helpful advice to cooperate with Pedro.** I sincerely pray for Hans Svensson to sleep peacefully in heaven.

References

European Medical Physics News, Winter 2011/12 (2012).
"Pedro Andreo — the road to and through Medical Physics," ibid. p. 6.
"Hans Svensson — one of the Pioneers in our field," ibid. p. 23.
M. Karlsson, "Hans Svensson — In memoriam," Web page of Radiofysik.org (2012).
Radiation Dosimetry: Electrons with Initial Energies Between 1 and 50 MeV, ICRU Report 21 (International Commission on Radiation Units and Measurements, 1972).
Radiation Dosimetry: Electron Beams with Energies Between 1 and 50 MeV, ICRU Report 35 (International Commission on Radiation Units and Measurements, 1984).

Notes

* By the way, the list of references in ICRU Report 21 also contained six of our papers on the work done at Radiation Center of Osaka Prefecture; and a similar list in ICRU Report 35, five later papers on our work.
** The collaboration produced 11 papers published in refereed journals in the period 1991–1998.

Boy of Age 16 Asks Me about Relativity, etc.9. Recommended Books on and by Einstein for Young People

2012-01-19T10:41:00.000+09:00

Books recommended.

A friend of mine on Twitter, Aaron (a pseudonym), is an overseas, 16-year old boy, who seriously admires Albert Einstein and wants to become a physicist. He continually writes me (Ted, also a pseudonym) questions about the theory of relativity and related topics, and I am sending answers. In this series of blog posts, those questions and answers are reproduced with modifications. I am not an expert in the fields of physics related to relativity. So, my answers might contain errors. If you find any error, please do not hesitate to write a comment for the benefit, not only of the boy and me, but also of other readers.

This time, Aaron does not pose a question, but write about Einstein as follows by appending many photos of Einstein to his email message:

Aaron: Oh my God! That smile of Einstein! I'm gonna die. I want a hug from him! He's cute, isn't he?

Ted: You have a sizeable collection of photos of Einstein and talk about him like a lover. Now there are a lot of biographies of him for people from young to adult ages (a search of paperbound books by the key words "biography Einstein" at Amazon.com gives a list of about 500 titles). Have you read any of those for adults?

I liked a book written in a relatively early year (first published in 1972). It is entitled "Albert Einstein, Creator and Rebel." The author is Einstein's close collaborator Banesh Hoffmann. Another book about Einstein I recommend to young people is "Einstein: A Centenary Volume" edited by A. P. French (published by Heinemann for the International Commission on Physics Education, 1979). You may find copies of these books at a library or an old-book shop.

As for books by Einstein, "The Evolution of Physics" written together with one of his co-workers Leopold Infeld (Touchstone, 1967, still available; first edition 1938; my copy, Cambridge University Press, 1978) is one of the most excellent books for young people to learn about the development of ideas in physics from early concepts to relativity and quanta.

By the way, it is Einstein's birthday and is also π day, today. The reason for the latter is that it is March (the 3rd month) 14th. So, his birthday is especially convenient to remember. Do you have any party for this day at your home?

(Originally written on March 11 and 14, 2011)

Boy of Age 16 Asks Me about Relativity, etc.8. "I Can't Get Gauss's Flux Theorem"

2012-01-10T10:47:00.000+09:00

Gauss's portrait published in Astronomische Nachrichten 1828.
By Siegfried Detlev Bendixen [Public domain],
from Wikimedia Commons.

A friend of mine on Twitter, Aaron (a pseudonym), is an overseas, 16-year old boy, who seriously admires Albert Einstein and wants to become a physicist. He continually writes me (Ted, also a pseudonym) questions about the theory of relativity and related topics, and I am sending answers. In this series of blog posts, those questions and answers are reproduced with modifications. I am not an expert in the fields of physics related to relativity. So, my answers might contain errors. If you find any error, please do not hesitate to write a comment for the benefit, not only of the boy and me, but also of other readers.

Aaron: I have a problem with Maxwell's equations. We don't learn them at school, and there're a lot of math. I'm not ready for that level of math. So, I can't get Gauss's flux theorem. But I want to understand it.

Ted: You are quite ahead of school lessons. Gauss's flux theorem was formulated by Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1835 and is also known as Gauss's law. I learned it only at university.

Concepts of physics can be learned to some extent without the use of math. For example, Gauss's law is stated by words as follows: The electric flux through any closed surface is proportional to the enclosed electric charge (quoted in Ref. 1 from Ref. 2).

However, true understanding of working and beauty of physics and practical application of physical laws require mathematics. Especially, if you want to become a physicist, early study of essential mathematics together with physics would be useful. Gauss's law can be expressed either by the equation of the integral form or by the equation of the differential form. The equivalence of the two equations can be shown by the use of the divergence theorem in vector calculus. Doesn't this sound interesting? (See, for example, Ref. 1.)

In The Feynman Lectures on Physics (Ref. 3), Gauss's law appears in Chapter 4 of Volume II after necessary mathematical preparation of "Vector Integral Calculus" in Chapter 3. Why don't you learn by the use of that fine textbook of Feynman? If you want to understand Maxwell's equations before studying Feynman's hefty books, however, Daniel Fleisch's A Student's Guide to Maxwell's Equations (Ref. 4) might be useful. Fleisch also explains the equations after giving the preparation of necessary mathematics.

References

"Gauss's law," Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia (5 January 2012 at 13:53).
Raymond A. Serway, Physics for Scientists and Engineers with Modern Physics, 4th edition (1996).
Richard P. Feynman, edited by Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Boxed set: The New Millennium Edition (Basic Books, 2011).
Daniel A. Fleisch, A Student's Guide to Maxwell's Equations (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

(Originally written on March 5–12, 2011)

Boy of Age 16 Asks Me about Relativity, etc.7. Would Einstein Have Liked Harry Potter or High School Musical?

2012-01-06T11:59:00.005+09:00

Albert Einstein in 1893 (age 14).
By Kenosis at en.wikipedia [Public domain],
from Wikimedia Commons.

A friend of mine on Twitter, Aaron (a pseudonym), is an overseas, 16-year old boy, who seriously admires Albert Einstein and wants to become a physicist. He continually writes me (Ted, also a pseudonym) questions about the theory of relativity and related topics, and I am sending answers. In this series of blog posts, those questions and answers are reproduced with modifications. I am not an expert in the fields of physics related to relativity. So, my answers might contain errors. If you find any error, please do not hesitate to write a comment for the benefit, not only of the boy and me, but also of other readers.

Aaron: Would Einstein have liked Harry Potter or High School Musical, if he were alive now? What do you think about these fiction stories?

Ted: Oh, these are not questions about physics but fascinating ones. I have never been well acquainted with those. However, I believe that I would have liked to read the book of Harry Potter and to watch High School Musical on TV, if I were now at your age. This is because I hear that these stories contain some flavor of science fiction and because, at the age of fifteen, I enjoyed reading Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (in Japanese translation) and a science fiction series about space travel in a magazine for children.

As for Einstein, it is extremely difficult to assess whether he would have liked Harry Potter or High School Musical. In his childhood, Einstein is said to have read and discussed many books with Max Talmey, a medical student from Poland. Those books are reported to have included a series of popular science books (Ref. 1). Einstein's mother was a talented pianist and ensured the children's musical education (Ref. 2). From these facts, it would not be totally wrong to think Einstein would have liked Harry Potter and High School Musical, if he were now at your age.

Additional message written by Ted: Last evening, I was reading the book on the theory of time written, without using equations, by Sean Carroll (Ref. 3) and found that he, a theoretical cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology, mentions Voldemort and Professor Trelawney from the Harry Potter books. So, this famous scientist seems to have liked Harry Potter as you do. Isn't this a happy report to you?

References

Banesh Hoffmann, Albert Einstein (New american Library, New York, 1972). p. 24.
"Albert Einstein," in Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (2 January 2012 at 19:05) footnote 1.
S. Carroll, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time (Plume, London, 2010) p. 184.

(Originally written on March 2 and 9, 2011)

Boy of Age 16 Asks Me about Relativity, etc.6. What Is Dark Matter?

2012-01-04T10:53:00.005+09:00

Strong gravitational lensing as observed by the Hubble Space Telescope in Abell 1689 indicates the presence of dark matter (Ref. 1). Image by NASA, N. Benitez (JHU), T. Broadhurst (Racah Institute of Physics/The Hebrew University), H. Ford (JHU), M. Clampin (STScI), G. Hartig (STScI), G. Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory), the ACS Science Team and ESA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

A friend of mine on Twitter, Aaron (a pseudonym), is an overseas, 16-year old boy, who seriously admires Albert Einstein and wants to become a physicist. He continually writes me (Ted, also a pseudonym) questions about the theory of relativity and related topics, and I am sending answers. In this series of blog posts, those questions and answers are reproduced with modifications. I am not an expert in the fields of physics related to relativity. So, my answers might contain errors. If you find any error, please do not hesitate to write a comment for the benefit, not only of the boy and me, but also of other readers.

Aaron: What is dark matter? How did they know about it?

Ted: It is difficult for me to give my own, accurate description of dark matter. So, here I write a summary of the excellent Web page written by Professor Martin White at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Ref. 2).

Dark matter is "stuff" which cannot be seen directly. Its existence is inferred indirectly from observations of motions of astronomical objects, specifically, stellar, galactic, and galaxy cluster/supercluster observations. The basic principle of these observations is that if we measure velocities in some region, then there has to be enough mass there for gravity to stop all the objects flying apart. Such measurements done on large scales indicate that the amount of inferred mass is much more than can be explained by the luminous stuff. Hence, we infer that there is dark matter in the Universe.

Dark matter candidates are usually divided into two broad categories, with the second group being sub-divided:

Baryonic*
Non-Baryonic

Hot dark matter and
Cold dark matter.

For more details, see Ref. 2 and links there.

* Baryonic matter is matter composed mostly (with regard to mass) of baryons, which in turn are composite particles made up of three quarks, and includes atoms of any sort.

References

"Dark Matter," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (2 January 2012 at 17:44).
Martin White, Dark Matter.

(Originally written on March 2, 2011)

Lists of Films on Atomic Bombs

2011-12-31T11:12:00.001+09:00

The other day, I revived one of lost blog posts written in 2005. It was entitled "New books on atomic bombs." An overseas friend of mine wrote a comment on it and asked me if I knew a similar list of movies or documentaries. I did not know such a list. So, I made a search on the Internet, and results gotten are summarized here.

Lists of films on atomic bombs available on the Web

Films about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (19 entires)
Documentary films about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (subcategory of the above category) (9 entries)
List of Japanese films on atomic bombs on the page "原爆映画特集" (Feature: Atomic Bomb Movies) (19 entries)

The third list above is difficult for the overseas friend to understand. Thus, I made a modified list as given below by including a few entries from the first two lists, adding English titles and providing links to English Wikipedia pages when available.

I wish that these films that convey the colossal tragedy the atomic bombs brought are appreciated by a lot more of people world over and that total elimination of nuclear weapons is realized as soon as possible.

List of Japanese films on atomic bombs (a modification of the list at "原爆映画特集")

Note: English titles are official ones except for those given in parentheses, which are used to indicate to be the literal translation by T.T. Some of Wikipedia pages explain not only about the film but also dramas, books, etc. of the same title; and some others contain an extremely brief description only.

	Year of release	Japanese title	English title
1	1950	長崎の鐘	The Bells of Nagasaki
2	1952	原爆の子	Children of Hiroshima
3	1953	ひろしま	(Hiroshima)
4	1955	生きものの記録	I Live In Fear
5	1959	第五福竜丸	(Lucky Dragon 5)
6	1963	母	(Mother)
7	1970	地の群れ	Apart from Life
8	1976	はだしのゲン	Barefoot Gen
9	1977	はだしのゲン: 涙の爆発	Barefoot Gen: Explosion of Tears
10	1980	ヒロシマのたたかい: はだしのゲンPART3	Barefoot Gen: PART3 Battle of Hiroshima
11	1983	この子を残して	Children of Nagasaki
12	1983	せんせい	(Sensei)
13	1988	さくら隊散る	(Team Sakura Wiped Out)
14	1988	TOMORROW 明日	Tomorrow
15	1989	黒い雨	Black Rain
16	1991	八月の狂詩曲	Rhapsody in August
17	2001	H Story	H Story
18	2002	鏡の女たち	Women in the Mirror
19	2004	父と暮せば	The Face of Jizo
20	2005	二重被爆	(Double exposure)
21	2007	夕凪の街桜の国	Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms
22	2007	馬頭琴夜想曲	Matouqin Nocturne
23	2009	妻の貌	(Wife's Face)

Boy of Age 16 Asks Me about Relativity, etc.5. Object's Mass at Speed of Light

2011-12-30T09:35:00.005+09:00

Abstract image reminiscent of light rays flying past.
Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

A friend of mine on Twitter, Aaron (a pseudonym), is an overseas, 16-year old boy, who seriously admires Albert Einstein and wants to become a physicist. He continually writes me (Ted, also a pseudonym) questions about the theory of relativity and related topics, and I am sending answers. In this series of blog posts, those questions and answers are reproduced with modifications. I am not an expert in the fields of physics related to relativity. So, my answers might contain errors. If you find any error, please do not hesitate to write a comment for the benefit, not only of the boy and me, but also of other readers.

Aaron: The object's mass is zero when it is traveling at the speed of light, right? Where does its mass go? Does it turn into energy?

Ted: Surely, what is traveling with the speed of light, i.e., the photon (the quantum of light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation), has zero mass. It is to be noted that the photon always has zero mass and always flies with the seed of light. This property is known to belong to the photon only.*

Particles with masses different from zero, when they are at rest (rest masses), can be accelerated to speeds fairly close to the speed of light by the use of large accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider in CERN. When the particle get higher speeds, the mass of the particle does not approach zero, contrary to your supposition, but becomes larger to make the total energy higher. As a result, no body with a nonzero rest mass can be accelerated to reach just the speed of light. This is explained below by the use of a few equations (clicking on the image, you can see a larger one). Thus, the situation in your question that an object with a finite rest mass would reach the speed of light does not happen.

* Neutrinos were once thought to have zero mass, but the experimentally established phenomenon of neutrino oscillation requires neutrinos to have nonzero masses. As for the experiment that suggested the possibility of neutrinos traveling faster than light, mention will be made in a later story of this series.

(Originally written on February 28, 2011)

Boy of Age 16 Asks Me about Relativity, etc.4. Newton vs Einstein

2011-12-29T10:46:00.002+09:00

Isaac Newton. By Sir Godfrey Kneller [Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons.

A friend of mine on Twitter, Aaron (a pseudonym), is an overseas, 16-year old boy, who seriously admires Albert Einstein and wants to become a physicist. He continually writes me (Ted, also a pseudonym) questions about the theory of relativity and related topics, and I am sending answers. In this series of blog posts, those questions and answers are reproduced with modifications. I am not an expert in the fields of physics related to relativity. So, my answers might contain errors. If you find any error, please do not hesitate to write a comment for the benefit, not only of the boy and me, but also of other readers.

Aaron: It seems that Newton did not know exactly how gravity worked. Then, there came Einstein to find the answer. Why do they still write about Newton's law of gravity in textbooks?

Ted: Newton's law of gravity and equation of motion are highly accurate approximations to Einstein's general and special theories of relativity. Einsteinian mechanics did not make Newtonian mechanics useless but expanded the scope of the latter. The latter is quite simple and yet is useful for doing calculations of the motion of materials being situated in a weak gravitational field and having a speed much smaller than the speed of light. Therefore, we first study Newtonian mechanics at high schools.

(Originally written on February 24, 2011)

Boy of Age 16 Asks Me about Relativity, etc.3. Space and Time

2011-12-26T20:46:00.003+09:00

Diagram showing space and time in space-time. Here space is depicted as a two-dimensional entity in three-dimensional spacetime. Time from the observer's viewpoint is represented as a vertical line. Image by K. Aainsqatsi (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

A friend of mine on Twitter, Aaron (a pseudonym), is an overseas, 16-year old boy, who seriously admires Albert Einstein and wants to become a physicist. He continually writes me (Ted, also a pseudonym) questions about the theory of relativity and related topics, and I am sending answers. In this series of blog posts, those questions and answers are reproduced with modifications. I am not an expert in the fields of physics related to relativity. So, my answers might contain errors. If you find any error, please do not hesitate to write a comment for the benefit, not only of the boy and me, but also of other readers.

Aaron: Will there be time, if there is no space?

Ted: Your question does not seem to be a valid one in physics. Physics is the branch of natural science to study matter and its motion through spacetime; and these, i.e., matter, motion and spacetime, are inseparable from space.* From this viewpoint, physicists are not expected to think about the circumstance in which there is no space. In treating a complex problem, physicists often assume a simplified model of the situation, but elimination of space would make the problem non-physical.

However, the following should be noted in relation to your question: Approaches to quantum gravity, being studied for uniting quantum mechanics with general relativity, suggest the possibility that space and time are not fundamental entities but emergent phenomena (see, for example, Ref. 1). If such is the case, the phrase in your question, "there is no space," would have physical meaning in the sense that equations of quantum gravity would dispense with space and time variables.

* Especially in the theory of relativity, space and time (to say precisely, imaginary time) are treated symmetrically, and it can happen that part of time duration of one observer is part of spatial length of the other observer.

Reference

Luboš Motl, Emergent space and emergent time, The Reference Frame (2004).

(Originally written on February 23, 2011)

Boy of Age 16 Asks Me about Relativity, etc.2. Einstein and Black Holes

2011-12-25T10:49:00.004+09:00

Albert Einstein during a lecture in Vienna in 1921.
By Ferdinand Schmutzer [Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons.

A friend of mine on Twitter, Aaron (a pseudonym), is an overseas, 16-year old boy, who seriously admires Albert Einstein and wants to become a physicist. He continually writes me (Ted, also a pseudonym) questions about the theory of relativity and related topics, and I am sending answers. In this series of blog posts, those questions and answers are reproduced with modifications. I am not an expert in the fields of physics related to relativity. So, my answers might contain errors. If you find any error, please do not hesitate to write a comment for the benefit of the boy and me as well as that of other readers.

Aaron: I read in some books that Einstein did not believe in black holes. Then, why did he publish the work of general relativity that predicted black holes?

Ted: When he developed the theory, Albert Einstein did not notice that it would predict the existence of black holes. Only after the publication of the paper on general relativity, other physicists studied solutions of Einstein field equations to find the possible existence of black holes. (For the detailed history of finding black hole solutions, see Ref. 1.)

Einstein's disbelief in the black hole solution is explained in Ref. 2 as follows:

It seems that Einstein always was of the opinion that singularities in classical field theory are intolerable. They are intolerable from the point of view of classical field theory because a singular region represents a breakdown of the postulated laws of nature. I think one can turn this argument around and say that a theory that involves singularities and involves them unavoidably, moreover, carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

In other words, Einstein's belief in his own theory combined with his opinion about physical theories in general did not allow the existence of the black hole. However, his theory was cleverer than his opinion and predicted what was confirmed by (indirect) observations. A physical theory or an equation can sometimes be more reliable than the philosophical opinion even of the greatest man.

References

"Section 1. History" in "Black hole", Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (19 December 2011 at 11:28).
Quoted in Philosophical Problems of the Internal and External Worlds: Essays on the Phylosophy of Adolf Grünbaum edited by John Earman (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), as written by Peter Bergmann (1980, 156).

(Originally written on February 21, 2011)

Boy of Age 16 Asks Me about Relativity, etc.1. Evidence for Black Holes

2011-12-20T09:30:00.009+09:00

Illustration of black hole as a highly warped region of two-dimensional "space."
The real black hole is a highly warped region of four-dimensional spacetime.
Image: chrisroll / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A friend of mine on Twitter, Aaron (a pseudonym), is an overseas, 16-year old boy, who seriously admires Albert Einstein and wants to become a physicist. He continually writes me (Ted, also a pseudonym) questions about the theory of relativity and related topics, and I am sending answers. In this series of blog posts, those questions and answers are reproduced with modifications. I am not an expert in the fields of physics related to relativity. So, my answers might contain errors. If you find any error, please do not hesitate to write a comment for the benefit of the boy and me as well as that of other readers.

Aaron: It is said that there are many black holes in our galaxy, right? Nobody can see them. Then, how do they know that there are black holes? I guess there is no equation to show that there is a black hole out there.

Ted: You are right. Neither there is an equation to predict the positions of black holes,* nor we can directly observe them. However, astronomers say that the center of our Milky Way Galaxy is dominated by one supermassive black hole and that observations have hinted at the existence of many stellar mass black holes (stellar black holes) near the galactic center (Ref. 1).

The evidence for the existence of black holes is obtained by indirect observations. Because of its invisible interior, the presence of them can be inferred through their interaction with other matter. For example, there is a phenomenon called accretion of matter. In this phenomenon, gas falling into a black hole emits vast amounts of radiation (mainly X-rays), which may be detected by telescopes. Astronomers have also identified numerous stellar black hole candidates in binary star systems, by studying their interaction with their companion stars. For more details about observation of black holes, you can see Refs. 2 and 3.

* As for the possible existence of black holes, Einstein's equations of general relativity helped later theorists to find such possibilities. However, those equations were solved under different simplifying assumptions by different theorists. So, the solutions thus obtained did not necessarily give a firm proof of the existence of the black hole.

References

R. R. Britt, "Milky Way's center packed with black holes." Space.com (2005).
"Section 4. Observational Evidence" in "Black hole", Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (12 December 2011 at 05:45).
T. Bunn, "Is there any evidence that black holes exist?" in Black Holes FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) List (1995).

(Originally written on February 20, 2011; modified on December 23, 2011)

The Japanese Theoretical Physicist and Poet, Jun Ishiwara

2011-11-18T16:27:00.003+09:00

The cover of the book "Pioneer of Science Journalism: Biography of Jun Ishiwara."

The book entitled "Pioneer of Science Journalism: Biography of Jun Ishiwara" [1] was published recently, and I read a review of it [2]. The reviewer, Atsuko Tsuji, first writes as follows:

The name "Jun Ishiwara" seems to be unfamiliar to many people. So, the title of the book "Pioneer of Science Journalism" might be somewhat misleading.

I am quite familiar with that name, thus probably being one of the few such people now. "Nihon Shokokumin Bunko)" (a series of books for children) was published in 1936, and its revised edition was issued after World War II. Then I was in the sixth grade of the elementary school or the first grade of the junior high school and liked to read that series. The author of its seventh volume "Mysteries of the World" (1948, Shincho) was Jun Ishiwara. I learned atoms and molecules from that book. In addition to the effect of this book, Hideki Yukawa's winning of the Nobel Prize (1949) made me walk on the way to physics.

The aforementioned review article continues as follows:

As noted at the beginning by the author, he was one of the best theoretical physicists. In the early twentieth century, he first published first papers in Japan on relativity and quantum theory, which brought about a revolution in physics, and led discussion in the country.

This description reminded me of the fact that one of Ishiwara's article (written in German) was included in "History of Physics in Japan, Vol. 2: Reference Materials" [3]. In this book, Ishiwara's paper [4] is introduced by the following words:

This is the work in which Ishiwara (1881–1947) generalized the quantum rule independently of W. Wilson and A. Sommerfeld.

The same paper has also been mentioned in Ref. 5. Reference 3 also includes Ishiwara's two articles written in Japanese [6, 7].

The reviewer then writes, "He is also a tanka poet. . . ." After that, the following statements come:

It is even a surprise that the name of such a scientist is little known.

The love affair of Ishiwara, who had a wife and children, became a scandal, and he retired from the professorship at Tohoku Imperial University at the age of 42. Is this related to the unfamiliarity of him to people? After retirement, he pulled himself from research and became a person to discuss and communicate about science.

Ishiwara's love affair, together with his activities as a poet, is described in some detail in "Wikipedia" [8].

The review concludes by the sentence, "His life and words give us great suggestions about how the present-day science and scientists should be." I certainly want to read the book reviewed.

References

S. Nishio, "Pioneer of Science Journalism: Biography of Jun Ishiwara," (Iwanami, 2011) In Japanese.
A. Tsuji, "True scientist who discussed how physics should be," Asahi Shimbun (November 13, 2011) In Japanese.
Physical Society of Japan, ed., "History of Physics in Japan, Vol. 2, Reerence Materials" (Tokai University Press, 1978) In Japanese.
J. Ishiwara, "Die universelle Bedeutung dse Wirkungsquantums," Tokyo Sugaku Buturigakkai Kizi, Ser. 2, Vol. 8, pp. 106–116 (1915).
, in Twentieth Century Physics, Vol. 1, L. M. Brown, A. Pais and B. Pippard, ed. (Institute of Physics, 1995).
J. Ishiwara, "Impression of Einstain," in Einstein and Relativity, J. Ishiwara (Kaizo, 1921) pp. 137–160. In Japanese.
J. Ishiwara, "Earthquakes and science education," in Modern Natural Science, J. Ishiwara (1924) pp. 133–152. In Japanese.
"Jun Ishiwara," Wikipedia, Japanese edition (November 16, 2011).

A Mathematician's Unique Autobiography

2011-10-28T11:30:00.002+09:00

The other day, I phoned Haruko Iwasaki to tell how I enjoyed the class reunion of our elementary school, at which she had not attended because of difficulty in walking due to Parkinson's disease. On that occasion, she said to me, "I'll give you a book written by the famous mathematician Shimura-san, because you're the only scientific person I know in Japan. Do you know the name Goro Shimura?"

Haruko worked at universities of Princeton, Harvard and California on Japanese language and Japanese literature; and now lives in Kobe after becoming Professor Emeritus at the final work place. She got a copy of Shimura's book in California from a certain person who came from an overseas country. This happened because the latter heard that the former had been an acquaintance with Shimura at Princeton University.

When I talked by phone with Haruko, I did not remember the name Goro Shimura and said, "No, I don't." After getting the book, however, I reminded myself of that his name had probably appeared in newspapers in the middle of 1990s in relation to the proof of Fermat's last theorem. I had a book, Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem (Walker, 1997) written by Simon Singh but had not read it yet. Browsing some pages of Singh's book, I confirmed that my memory was right.

The book Haruko gave me is Shimura's autobiography entitled The Map of My Life (Springer, 2008). Shimura's English is readable, his observations are unique, and anecdotes of luminaries are also included. Mathematical-minded people should not expect to learn about algebraic geometry or such from this book, but he depicts a rough outline of his research as well as what is valuable in the investigation of mathematics and memories of Taniyama, who contributed together with Shimura to finding Taniyama-Shimura conjecture (now called modularity theorem; this had a crucial role in the proof of Fermat's last theorem accomplished by Andrew Wiles). Therefore, the people of the sort mentioned above would also be able to enjoy this book deeply.

Goro Shimura was born in 1930. So, he is older than Haruko and I by five years only. Interestingly, however, she had the impression that he might be older than her by one generation, like Hideki Yukawa, possibly because of his elderly manner of speaking and impressive accomplishments achieved already at his young ages. Haruko told me that Shimura's look was like a noh mask. We can confirm this to be true in a sense by a full-page sized portrait of him on page 172 of Singh's book mentioned above.

Haruko also told me that Shimura used to recite rōkyoku or something like that for his friends without attaching the melody and that he was interested in porcelain. In fact, he published the book "The Story of Imari: The Symbols and Mysteries of Antique Japanese Porcelain" in 2008.

At the beginning of the book, Shimura writes about the daily life in Tokyo and things related to it in the 1930s, for the reason that those "things completely ordinary and known to almost everyone" of his generation "will never be written, and as a consequence, will be forgotten" (page 1). Reading them with nostalgic feeling, I thought that he also did an excellent job here. He gives an example of popular songs "that were not so objectionable": "La, la, la, red flowers carried on a wagon, / Spring has come from the village to the town, / ..." (a skilful translation from Japanese, perhaps made by himself; page 14). He does not write the title of this song, but I was able to figure it to be "Haru no uta ('The song of spring' sang by Mitsuko Tsukimura in 1937)," because it was one of my favorite songs.

Shimura's finding of the practice of people in Kyoto is also fascinating: "I later learned that false compliments and even false invitations expecting declination were common in Kyoto" (page 30). (By the way, Haruko requested me to visit her someday in the near future, during our conversation by phone. She is not the person of Kyoto. So, I do not think it a false invitation.) He shows keen insight into the history of politics, writing a little about possible war responsibilities of Hirohito (page 37) and stating that there is no justification for the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki (page 57). However, I think it to be unfortunate that he seems to be an anti-Marxist by confusing the Marxism with the wrong dictatorship by the Communist party in the former USSR and North Korea (page 86).

Shimura's scathing remark about the famous Japanese mathematician Teiji Takagi at the latter's old age might surprise Japanese readers, because the former quotes the words, "Kunshi is peaceful and not arrogant, whereas shojin is arrogant and not peaceful," from The Analects of Confucius to mean Takagi was shojin (page 117). He also criticizes G. H. Hardy's following words in A Mathematician's Apology as "rather pompous" (page 161): "No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science is a young man's game." I do not think that these criticisms by Shimura themselves pompous but believe that they reflect his attitude not to be subservient to the authority as well as his solid determination to continue working on mathematics till old ages.

With regard to an important mathematical work, Shimura's view, according to his description, is different from that of most, or at least many, mathematicians, who have the prejudice that "The more difficult, the better." He attaches importance to the significance of the result in the development of mathematics rather than to the difficulty of deriving or proving the result (page 137 and on some earlier pages). From the viewpoint of me as a physicist, this seems to be quite reasonable. I have to add the following bottom line: Most books I read in the afternoons this summer and early autumn made me sleepy, but Shimura's autobiography was a complete exception.

I thank to Yoshihiro Matsumori for our conversation on the message page of Facebook, which became the motive of writing this blog post.

Hideki Yukawa's Lindau Lecture

2011-09-04T15:36:00.001+09:00

Reading a Scientific American article on the 61st Annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting [1], I have learned the home page The Nobel Laureate Meeting at Lindau [2]. Scrolling the page downwards, we see a link to the Lectures Online page. There we can listen to more than 100 lectures of Nobel Laureates online. Among those lectures, I have found Hideki Yukawa's speech at the 3rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting (1953, 1st Meeting in Physics) entitled "Attempt at a Unified Theory of Elementary Particles." Instead of the abstract of his presentation, a brief introduction is given by the editor Anders Bárány.

Bárány writes that Yukawa's full written lecture can be found in a special publication of the journal Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau from 1981 and that the printed version contains a number of rather complicated equations not shown during his speech in Lindau. The Japanese version of the full written lecture appeared in November 1953 issue of Shizen and was reprinted in the special number for Yukawa memorial of the same journal published in November 1981.

Here are essential words from Bárány's introduction:

This was a time when one of the main problems in physics was the large number of elementary particles detected in cosmic rays and in high-energy accelerators. [. . . T]he problem was that, as Yukawa phrased it in his lecture, "Powell discovered a great number of extra particles which I did not need." Today we have the Standard Model of particles and forces, through which all the “extra” particles can be classified and all the forces computed. But we still miss what Yukawa was looking for in his attempt to formulate a unified theory of elementary particles [. . .]

Yukawa's attempt at that time was in the direction of nonlocal field theory.

There was a rumor that Yukawa's spoken English had the intonation of the Kyoto dialect. Listening to his Lindau lecture, I do not think so. His voice in this talk sounds young (he was 46 years old at that time) and fairly similar to the voice of his son, Taka'aki, whom we can listen to in the narration of the video The Yukawa Story [3]. I also think that Yukawa's talk in English is more listenable than his lecture in Japanese at the classroom of the university.

I owe to Mr. M. M. for the information of the Japanese version of Yukawa's written Lindau lecture.

S. Mirsky, Noble Nobel faces: A week in Lindau, where scientists are celebrities. Scientific American (September 1, 2011); printed version, September issue, page 78 (2011).
The Nobel Laureate Meeting at Lindau: Educating, Inspiring, Connecting scientific Generations since 1951, www.lindau-nobel.org.
The Yukawa story, You Tube video (uploaded on December 23, 2009).

National Policy and the Principles of Autonomy, Democracy and Openness

2011-06-22T20:23:00.001+09:00

On Monday, June 20, the TV channel of NHK BS premium aired the program "Superb feast of beauty: Kaii Higashiyama's journey. Part 2: Challenging Kyoto." In this program, Higashiyama's painting works made in Kyoto were introduced, and a few commentators analyzed them. After seeing the program, I wanted to see those paintings again in the book "Kyoraku Shiki: Kaii Higashiyama Shogashu (Four Seasons in Kyoto: Kaii Higashiyama's Small Picturebook" (Shinchosha, 1984) and went to the drawing-room to bring the book from the bookshelf there. Then, I found the book entitled "Nuclear Power Generation" (edited by Mitsuo Taketani; Iwanami, 1976). I browsed some of its pages and found the following passages:

[. . .] So long as she neglects the autonomous effort of developing her own reactors by keeping the lines of importing mass produced power reactors of light water type, Japan should be unable to be freed from the global strategy of the US to sell enriched uranium. (Page 197.)

The factor that is mainly giving damage to Japan's current nuclear policy is the fact that, regardless of the presence of the three nuclear principles incorporated in the Atomic Energy Basic Law, the principle of "openness" has been ignored and the principle of maximum confidentiality has been kept. This has irretrievably impaired the integrity of the Atomic Energy Commission and electric power companies.

Further, the principle of "democracy" has clearly been violated. Scientists and engineers convenient to the Government and industries have been employed as members of Commission, etc., and their views have always been found faulty. On the other hand, those who had decent views and criticized the national policy have not been employed as such members. (Pages 201–202.)

Essentially, there is no other way than faithfully to keep the three principles of "openness", "democracy" and "autonomy" in order to amend Japan's nuclear future and to convince the people of the country. (Page 204, the last sentence of the main text.)

Those words were written about 20 years after the introduction of nuclear reactors into Japan. For the additional period of about 35 years from that time, the nuclear policy was run without correcting its ignorance of the three nuclear principles. This is considered to have led to the severe accidents at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The three principles, though incorporated into the Atomic Energy Basic Law but always violated, should be quite sad, if it had a mind. The importance of the same three principles is not limited to nuclear power policy. Autonomy, democracy, and openness must be respected in all areas of Government's actions. The national policy that ignores these principles would collapse sooner or later.

Hideki Yukawa's Words about Nuclear Power Development -3-

2011-06-17T10:20:00.008+09:00

Among the three essays of Yukawa on nuclear energy, the last one, "Nuclear power in Japan: Haste makes waste," was written in the year of Yukawa's resignation from the (Japan) Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC). That essay begins with the following sentence:

Last year (1956) "the Atomic Energy Basic Law" was enacted, and the Atomic Energy Commission was established. Then, a number of significant changes happened to the domestic as well as international situations about nuclear energy.

The significant changes meant in the above quote can be seen in Ref. 1 as follows (partial omissions are made in the quote):

Being triggered by the first Atoms for Peace Conference held in August previous year, nuclear boom arrived. On January 1, "the Atomic Energy Basic Law" was established, and the JAEC started [as described by Yukawa]. Matsutaro Shoriki was appointed the first chairman of the JAEC. Atomic Energy Bureau was also inaugurated under Prime Minister's Office. Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI; presently, Japan Atomic Energy Agency) and Nuclear Fuel Corporation were launched in May and August. On the other hand, an industry group established Japan Atomic Industrial Forum (presently, Japan Atomic Industrial Association) in March. The followings happened overseas: The No. 1 reactor of the Calder Hall nuclear power station in Britain started the sending of power in May, and the General Assembly of United Nations adopted the Charter of the International Atomic Energy Agency on October 23.

These are truly high-flying moves. Furthermore, we find the followings in the nuclear chronology of that year in Japan [Ref. 1]: On January 13, the JAEC Chairman M. Shoriki released the inaugural statement, including the plan of the earliest importing of research reactors from the US to strengthen the system for the development of nuclear energy. On the same day, the Cabinet decided the importing of water-boiler and CP-5 types research reactors from the US. On February 10, JAERI was permitted to import, from the US, four tons each of natural uranium and heavy water for research. On March 23, the JAEC determined the basic outline of the development and utilization of nuclear power and suggested the development of breeder reactors. On March 27, JAERI made the covenant of importing a water-boiler type nuclear reactor from North American Airlines in the US. — These led to Yukawa's expression of intention to resignate from the JAEC on April 24 (the date of actual resignation is March 29, 1957).

In the third essay on nuclear energy, Yukawa first claims the following about the use of isotopes, i.e., the use of nuclear energy in a broad sense:

[. . .] the problems of preventing danger and controlling conditions for health will become important. We have to make every effort to solve these problems.

Then, Yukawa enters into the issue of nuclear power generation and points out as follows:

The next stage should be the one in which researchers and technicians in our country have to show more creativity and autonomy. For this purpose, it is necessary at least to go through the steps of domestic designing and manufacturing of reactors, production of fuel, establishing the method of spent fuel disposal, etc.

The national movement in history was quite contrary to the steps Yukawa thought to be necessary.

Yukawa further writes,

It is clear that we are no longer allowed to leave the issue of nuclear power indefinitely on the desk.

While the above view is the one pressed by the situation, he sharply criticizes Japan's nuclear policy as follows:

Because such a sudden change of the situation is also expected to occur in the future, hastening should be avoided concerning power reactors. It would be quite uncomfortable that, while some people are making preparations for raising seedlings, the other people suddenly appear with cut flowers from a shop.

In the last paragraph of the essay, Yukawa gives the following warning:

In the Western world, there is a saying, "Make haste slowly." In Japan we also have the proverb, "Haste makes waste."* With respect to nuclear power, these words fit quite well to the point. [. . .] At the same time, we have to think about nuclear weapons, which is the largest obstacle to the peaceful use of nuclear energy. We Japanese should make every effort more intensely than before to eliminate them from all over the world as soon as possible, on this occasion of our country's having joined the United Nations.

The following was reported recently [Ref. 2]:

An official's testimony has made this clear: Forty years ago, Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant of Tokyo Electric Power Company prepared emergency power generators in the basement by adopting "the American design," which had been developed against hurricanes and tornadoes, and this made accidents extremely large. The underground of the power plant was entirely soaked in water by the tsunami more than 10 meters high and lost all electric power sources at once.

Japan's policy immediately to import nuclear reactors without considering Yukawa's warnings has led to the disastrous accidents of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, producing a lot of radioactive waste just as was told by the proverb. Reflecting their own responsibility fully, all the Japanese should pave the way for the complete abolition of nuclear power plants in our country and the comprehensive elimination of nuclear weapons from the world over. (End)

* Note by the present author: The Japanese proverb is literally translated as "When in haste, take the roundabout way." However, this is too long to be used as the translation of the subtitle of Yukawa's essay, so that it has been replaced by another saying in English of the same meaning.

Nuclear Chronology: 1956, Web site of Research Organization for Information Science & Technology, in Japanese.
Wrong adoption of "American design" for nuclear reactors: Generators in the basement against hurricanes, Asahi Shimbun, Evening edition (June 11, 2011) in Japanese.

Hideki Yukawa's Words about Nuclear Power Development -2-

2011-06-13T20:44:00.001+09:00

Hideki Yukawa's Auto-Collected Writings Vol. 3 [Ref. 1] includes the following three essays about nuclear power:

(1) Atomic energy and humanity's turning point -1954 -, p. 261.
(2) The nuclear issue and the true nature of science -1954 -, p. 265.
(3) Nuclear power in Japan: Haste makes waste -1957 -, p. 269.

In essay (1), Yukawa writes that we have entered such a period in which each of us has to think about the tight relationship among the fates of people in different countries and has to pay far greater efforts than ever in order to save mankind from the threat of nuclear weapons. He also describes his own belief that he has to think about it more seriously as a scientist and that he stands at closer to this problem as one of the Japanese, than other persons. In spite of the presence of the words "atomic energy" in the title, this essay does not yet refer to the problems of nuclear reactors.

In essay (2), Yukawa writes first, "Since the beginning of March this year, nuclear issues have become more familiar than before to grow up to the subject of intense interest of the general public." Then, he explains the differences between the basic studies of atomic physics (nuclear and particle physics in the present terminology) and studies of nuclear science application.

As for March 1954, we have to remember the following things: On the sixteenth, it was revealed by Yomiuri Shimbun that the Japanese tuna fishing boat, Daigo Fukuryū Maru, had been exposed to fallout from the United States' thermonuclear device (H-bomb) test on Bikini Atoll (it happened on March 1); and on the twenty-second, the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), established under the US National Security Council (NSC), proposed to provide experimental nuclear reactor to Japan, which became the beginning of the US plans to suppress anti-nuclear movements in Japan caused by the anger against A- and H-bomb sufferings [Ref. 2]. Earlier than this, three conservative parties of Japan submitted a proposal to the Diet on March 2. It was a 250 million yen budget for nuclear reactors and was passed without discussion on April 3.

On the other hand, on March 18, 1954, the Special Committee of Nuclear Science under the Science Council of Japan decided to keep the three principles of independence, democracy and openness in nuclear science research. On April 23, the Science Council of Japan condemned the Government's approach to nuclear reactors and issued a statement about the refusal of nuclear weapons research and complying with the three principles aforementioned [Ref. 3].

The words of "nuclear reactors" does not yet appear in Yukawa's essay (2), but the following passage is included at its end:

[…] as the research develops to extend its applications, a significant and unintended impact on human life happens to appear at the outside of the original purpose. As a scientist and as one of human beings, I repeat many times to reflect this: Which would the application of science produce, the result to which humans are grateful or the opposite result that threatens humanity? Which would the branching point of the main road of science lead to, the road to hell or the road to heaven?

The two kinds of results and the two roads described in the above passage might have come to Yukawa's attention from the thought about A- and H-bombs. However, he pointed out the truth that a dreadful result always has a possibility to occur ahead of "the branching point." Looking back on those words of his, we find that Yukawa even predicted the disasters at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. (To be continued.)

References

H. Yukawa, Auto-Collected Writings, Vol. 3 (Asahi Shimbun, 1971).
US–Japan relations and the headwaters of nuclear power plants (4), Shimbun Akahata (June 10, 2011) in Japanese.
Nuclear Chronology: 1954, Web site of Research Organization for Information Science & Technology.

Hideki Yukawa's Words about Nuclear Power Development -1-

2011-06-11T14:47:00.002+09:00

The decisions of any kind regarding agreements about or implementation of power reactors will surely have an important impact on the future of long-term nuclear power development in Japan. Accordingly, we should be much cautious about it. — Hideki Yukawa, Atomic Energy Commission Monthly Report, January issue (1957) in Japanese.

In January 1956, Matsutaro Shoriki, the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, released The plan for the construction of nuclear power plants in five years and conclusion of the atomic-power agreement with United States. At the end of that year, the Japan–United States Atomic Agreement, which had guaranteed the independent nuclear research in Japan, began to be reviewed for revision. Hideki Yukawa resigned the Atomic Energy Commission in protest against this. Thereafter, the Atomic Energy Commission was dominated by the Government of Liberal Democratic Party, and was transformed to the agency of promoting nuclear-reactor construction. Yukawa's words quoted above represent the accusation against such a situation just before his resignation. [The above description is based on: US–Japan relations and the headwaters of nuclear power plants (4), Shimbun Akahata (June 10, 2011) in Japanese].

It is deeply regrettable that the absence, in the Atomic Energy Commission, of scientists who took over Yukawa's spirit of protest was one of the factors leading to the nuclear accidents in Fukushima.

The Great Writer's Essay in His Childhood

2011-06-03T20:46:00.000+09:00

The Nobel-Prize winning writer Kenzaburo Oe writes a series of a single-page essay in the magazine Tosho under the column name of "Intimate Letters." His essay of this month is entitled "Nambo-nandemo."

When he was in elementary school, Oe wrote an essay of the following story about his grandmother: Being hurt by the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a friend of hers was in hospital, so that the grandmother visited the friend. On returning home, she uttered the word "nambo-nandemo" (a dialect word to mean "too dreadful to say anything") to refer to her feeling of having seen the landscape of Hiroshima without any building at all.

His teacher told him that it might be possible to make his essay appear in a local newspaper by sending it to her acquaintance at the newspaper company but that he should rewrite dialect words into common ones. However, Oe did not want to change the grandmother's word of lament "nambo-nandemo" and told so to his teacher. Then, the teacher rejected to send it to the newspaper. A long time after that, the word "nambo-nandemo!" came to his mind on looking at the disasters of the Tohoku earthquake and Fukushima nuclear power plant. He adds to say that he cannot but shout this word especially against the government and the nuclear power plant.

Recently, German and Swiss governments decided to abolish all nuclear power plants of their countries by the year 2022 and 2034, respectively. It is in Japan, whose nuclear accident at Fukushima affected those decisions, that such a policy is deadly needed be made as soon as possible.

The Japanese Mathematician Shigekiyo Muramatsu

2011-05-04T10:52:00.014+09:00

Yesterday, Arjen Dijksman, a Twitter friend of mine, told me on twitter that the Twitter user by the name of OnThisDayInMath was looking for pictures of Matsumura's tomb, Sengakuji, and the inscription on the path, in relation to a blog article (Ref. 1). This article quotes the following description from a March 1908 article in the American Mathematical Monthly:

[O]ne of [the 47 ronin], Shigekiyo Matsumura, was the greatest Asiatic mathematician of his age, who in his work Sanso, published in 1663, calculated the length of one side of a regular inscribed polygon of 32768 or 215 sides, obtaining 0.000095873798655313483 and thence for the value of pi 3.141592648, which is accurate to seven places of decimalsone of them, Shigekiyo Matsumura, was the greatest Asiatic mathematician of his age, who in his work Sanso, published in 1663, calculated the length of one side of a regular inscribed polygon of 32768 or 215 sides, obtaining 0.000095873798655313483 and thence for the value of pi 3.141592648, which is accurate to seven places of decimals ...

I made the search of "Shigekiyo Matsumura" and "Sanso" on the Internet to find that the correct name of the author of Sanso was "Shigekiyo Muramatsu" and that he himself was not the member of the forty-seven ronin (赤穂四十七士). The most useful source of my finding was Ref. 2, my translation from which is given below (the original Japanese text is given in Appendix):

Shigekiyo Muramatsu (村松茂清, 1608–1695) published Sanso (算俎) in 1663. Muramatsu served Asano (浅野) family and possibly had a math institute in Edo [present Tokyo]. Muramatsu had only a daughter, and took Hidenao (秀直) into his family as a son-in-law [the daughter's husband]. Hidenao and his son Takanao (高直) joined the forty-seven ronin to cause the Akō incident. In Sanso, Muramatsu arranged idai [problems published in earlier Japanese mathematics books written without answers] by classifying them into different levels with consideration for ease of learning. In this book, he also showed the calculation of pi from the regular inscribed polygon of 32768 sides to correctly obtain the value 3.1415926. Thus, this book was the first in the mathematical calculation of pi in Japan. Sanso was republished in 1684 by the title of Sanposanso (算法算俎). This item [possessed by Kyoto University Library and presented in the exhibition] is the copy of this republication, but it is not clear if this is the one published in 1684. Inside the back cover, it is written that this was bought in September 8, 1857, in Asakusa-kuramae.

We can see the names of all the forty-seven ronin in a list of a Wikipedia page (Ref. 3). The list shows Hidenao and Takanao with their middle names included as 村松喜兵衛秀直 and 村松三太夫高直, but not Shigekiyo. It is natural because the Akō incident was in 1703 (Refs. 3, 4), and Shigekiyo had died in 1695 as written in Ref. 2. Thus, I am not sure if Shigekiyo's tomb is in Sengakuji Temple together with those of the forty-seven ronin.

References

"Pi and the 47 Ronin." Pat's Blog (September 5, 2009).
The Catalog of the Exhibition "Wasan no Jidai (和算の時代, The Age of Japanese Mathematics),"edited by Kenji Ueno, Chapter 3, p 28, item 66 (Kyoto University Library, 2003) (In Japanese).
"赤穂浪士 (Akō-rōshi)," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Japanese edition (March 19, 2011, 10:23).
"Forty-seven Ronin," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (23 April 2011, 05:32).

Appendix. The Original of Ref. 2

　村松茂清（むらまつ　しげきよ、1608－1695）は寛文３年（1663）に算俎を出版しました。村松は浅野家に仕えていましたが、江戸に数学塾を持っていたようです。村松には娘しかなく、婿養子秀直を迎えましたが、秀直と秀直の子高直は赤穂四十七士の討ち入りに参加しました。村松は「算俎」のなかで、遺題の問題を内容別にレベル分けして配列し、学習しやすいように配慮しました。「算俎」では円に内接する正32768角形の周の長さを計算して円周率を3.1415926まで正しく計算しました。円周率を数学的に計算した我が国初の書物です。「算俎」は天和４年（1684、同年貞享に改元）に「算法算俎」と題して再版されました。本書はこの再版本ですが、天和４年に出版されたものかどうかは不明です。裏表紙の裏に「安政四丁巳九月八日浅草蔵前求之」と記されています。

Notes added later

The revised version of Ref. 1 with an addendum appeared: "More on Pi and the 47 Ronin," Pat's Blog (May 3, 2011).
According to the Japanese Wikipedia page on Hidenao Muramatsu, Shigekiyo Matsumura had the middle name Kyūtaifu (九太夫) (the "middle name" was used as the daily nickname in those days of Japan), and he had a son. However, the son disappeared from home and was lost, so that Shigekiyo took Hidenao as a son-in-law.

The Disaster Report from Tohoku University

2011-05-02T14:37:00.001+09:00

Coming back from a bus trip to Okayama Prefecture late last evening, I found an email massage from a former colleague of mine, Naoki Toyota, who is now Professor at Department of Physics, Tohoku University. He writes as follows:

Find the file attached, "The March-11 disaster report from Sendai." I have sent this nonofficial, rather personal document to my overseas friends and asked them for distributing it to their colleagues. I would appreciate it if you could upload this email on your home page or provide a link to the URL of the report (a link to the home page of our Low-Dimensional Quantum Physics Group is also okay).
By the way, all my family including my mother-in-law and her family, living in the devastated coastal region, are safe.

Naoki's report consists of four pages of a PDF file and describes the damage caused by Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, as well as the status of recovery from it, at Tohoku University. Especially, detailed descriptions are given of those at Department of Physics and related facilities.

Just after the March-11 disaster, I thought of sending Naoki an email message of sympathy. However, I supposed that he might be busy responding to many similar messages (even I, living quite far from Tohoku, received some such messages from abroad). Thus, I refrained from sending a message. On the return path of yesterday's trip, I was thinking about sending him a note during this week. What an interesting phenomenon of synchronicity it is to find his message after returning home!

The Mirror Puzzle: Reversal Is Attributed to the Direction Defined Last

2011-01-14T21:36:00.006+09:00

Yesterday, a friend of mine invited me to join the Internet site "Quora." This site consists of a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. I thought that one of the topics I was able to give the best answer was the "mirror puzzle." Searching the topic of "Mirrors," I found it in the subcategory of "Optics" in the category of "Physics." It included a question, "Why does a mirror reverse things horizontally but not vertically?" This is what I call the mirror puzzle stated in a little different manner.

The question seems to have been posted on July 14, 2010, and there are three answers. The first answer is as follows:

A mirror actually reverses front and back. The image of your right hand remains directly in front of your right hand. But because you think of the image as a rotation of yourself, you're led to think that left and right are reversed.

Richard Feynman explains this with his usual wit and smiles here.

The next answer is similar to this, and is the quotation from Martin Gardner's book, Aha! Gotcha. The third answer explains that things seem to be flipped horizontally or vertically depending on your point of view. This does not explain the left–right reversal that appears as the difference in shape between the object and its mirror image. Only the last paragraph of the third answer explaining that mirroring is mathematically "orientation reversing" is meaningful.

In the first and the second explanations, the essential reason why you compare your image with yourself rotated along the vertical axis is not made clear. Noticing this point, we reach the following explanation I gave there as the fourth answer:

The "mirror puzzle" is commonly stated: Why does a plane mirror reverse left and right, but not top and bottom? This question refers to the left–right reversal in the shape of the mirror image of an object as compared with the original object, i.e., the reversal of the left–right asymmetry viewed from two different coordinate systems, each of which is intrinsic to the object or its mirror image. The left–right reversal in this sense always happens in mirroring the object for which left and right can be defined, irrespective of the relative configuration of the object to the mirror. The reason can be explained as follows:

Mirroring reverses the direction perpendicular to the mirror surface. Thus, the mirror image of an asymmetric object becomes its enantiomorph (an example of enantiomorphic pairs is a pair of left and right hands). An enantiomorph is, or can be considered to have been, obtained by reversal in any single direction of an object ("orientation reversing" mentioned in the third answer; also equivalent to "space inversion" or "parity operation" in physics, in which all the three directions are reversed).

However, we can define the left–right direction of an object (or the mirror image) only after defining the top–bottom and front–back directions from the external view* of the object (or the mirror image). Thus, the top and front of the enantiomorph is always regarded as the same sides, in the external view, of the top and front of the original object, so that the direction reversed in the enantiomorph has to be attributed to the direction defined last, i.e., the left–right direction.

The key point lies in the nature of the definition of left and right. Explanations by Richard Feynman, Martin Gardner and many others missed this point. The method of Feynman and Gardner to make a comparison between you and your mirror image is nothing but the precedent determination of the top–bottom and front–back directions of the mirror image.

More detailed explanations can be found in the following references:

M. C. Corballis, "Much ado about mirrors." Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Vol. 7, pp. 163-169 (2000).
T. Tabata and S. Okuda, "Mirror reversal simply explained without recourse to psychological processes." ibid. pp. 170–173 (2000).

H. Yoshimura and T. Tabata, "Relationship between frames of reference and mirror-image reversals." Perception Vol. 36, pp. 1049–1056 (2007).

* The external view is mostly the shape. However, for a street car with a front–back symmetric shape, for example, motion defines the front–back direction.

Fumiko Yonezawa Reviews the Japanese Edition of The Strangest Man

2010-12-26T15:50:00.009+09:00

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom (Basic Books/Perseus Book Group), written by Graham Farmelo, was the winner of the Costa Book Award for Biography and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology, in the year 2009 of its publication. This book was also selected as one of the best books of 2009 by The Economist, The New York Times Book Review and Amazon.com. The Japanese edition of the book was published by Hayakawa Shobo, Tokyo, in September 2010. The translator was Michiyo Yoshida. The Japanese title is not the literal translation of the original but means, "The Sea of Quantum, Dirac's Abyss: The Highly Gifted Physicist's Glorious Achievements and Reticent Life."

Fumiko Yonezawa's review of the Japanese edition has appeared in The Akahata. This is the first review of it I have seen in the mass media. Fumiko Yonezawa is Professor Emeritus of Keio University, the first woman President of the Physical Society of Japan and one of the laureates of L'ORÉAL-UNESCO for Women in Science Award 2005, for her pioneering theory and computer simulations of amorphous semiconductors and liquid metals.

The Akahata or Shimbun Akahata (literal translation, Newspaper Red Flag) is the daily organ of the Japanese Communist Party in the form of a national newspaper. Started in 1928, Akahata has a 16-page daily edition and a 36-page Sunday edition, and the total circulation is 1.68 million (quoted from "Shimbun Akahata," Wikipedia, 7 December 2010 at 20:41). I subscribe to two newspapers in order to get deep and balanced view of politics in Japan; one is the "national newspaper," The Asahi, and the other is this Akahata. The latter often carries more excellent articles not only in politics but also in science and culture than "national newspapers." The review by Yonezawa has been printed on one of two-page "Books" column of the issue of Sunday, December 26, 2010, of the daily edition.

The title of the review in literal translation is "The group of scientists depicted elaborately," though the treatment of the book is centered on Paul Dirac. First, she introduces Dirac as a British theoretical physicist and one of the contributors to the establishment of quantum mechanics. Then, she praises his mathematical method of describing quantum mechanics as the most beautiful and his book Quantum Mechanics as the most outstanding among similar books. Especially, she notes that Dirac's book does not have any diagrams, includes a minimum necessary number of equations and many explanations by words like a book of philosophy. She even devotes a paragraph to describe how she enjoyed Dirac's book in her student days, being enchanted by and intoxicated with the beauty of the system he developed.

Next comes a brief introduction of Dirac again (namely, "he got successful results in young days and received Nobel Prize at the age of 31"), and the book being reviewed is mentioned as the biography of Dirac, consisting of more than 600 pages in the Japanese edition. Yonezawa writes that she liked the detailed depictions of the group of scientists in the ages of the formation of quantum mechanics and succeeding to it (the title of the review comes from her words here). She mentions about Dirac's extreme reticence and infers that only the truth of nature and equations would have been swirling in his brain. She quotes the following episode as contrary to this character of Dirac: When Peter Kapitza, a scientist friend of his from Russia, was forbidden to depart from the Stalinist Soviet Union, Dirac was busy trying to collect signatures from physicists for the request of release.

Finally, Yonezawa refers to Dirac's belief, "Physical laws must mathematically be beautiful," and concludes that everything of the physicist Dirac is described in this book. This is a relatively short review but invokes the readers' interest in the person of Dirac quite well so as to make them want to read this book.

About a quote from Marie Curie

2010-12-03T10:06:00.004+09:00

Madame Marie Curie: Science is essentially international, and it is only through lack of the historical sense that national qualities have been attributed to it. (iWise Wisdom Web page)

With regard to the purposes, efforts and benefits of science, these words of Marie Curie are valid. Thus, I do not think it appropriate, for example, to count numbers of Nobel-prize winners in science by nationality. However, the quote does not necessarily mean that science is a-cultural. Scientific activity is part of human culture, so that regional flavors are sometimes observed in the methods of doing science. Such flavors should be valued. (Adapted from my post on the above iWise Wisdom page.)

Note added later: By the way, I found the book, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout" by Lauren Redniss, among Amazon.com editors' picks for the best books of December 2010. I like Richard Rhodes's words of review, "Absolutely dazzling. Lauren Redniss has created a book that is both vibrant history and a work of art. Like radium itself, Radioactive glows with energy."

Did Wiener say these words?

2010-11-07T22:24:00.001+09:00

Karin Silvia, a friend of mine on Facebook, posted the following quote on her Facebook page:

The modern physicist is a quantum theorist on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and a student of gravitational relativity theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. On Sunday he* is neither, but is praying to his God that someone, preferably himself, will find the reconciliation between the two views." — Norbert Wiener [* In stead of the word "he", the original passage I have found uses "the physicist".]

On reading this, I wondered if these words were actually said or written by Wiener; and asked Karin Silvia about the source of the words. She replied that three Web sites showed this quote as credited to Wiener but that the source was not given. My reason for wondering was this: The words well describe the current state of theoretical physics, but Wiener died in 1964.

Therefore, I made a search at the Web sites of Google books and amazon.com; and found that the source of the above quote was the following: Norbert Wiener, "I am a mathematician: the later life of a prodigy; an autobiographical account of the mature years and career of Norbert Wiener and a continuation of the account of his childhood in Ex-prodigy" (Gollancz, 1956) p. 109.

The page I saw by the "Look inside!" function at amazon.com showed that the quote given above came after the introductory words as follows:

Physics is at present a mass of partial theories which no man has yet been able to render truly and clearly consistent. It has been well said that the modern physicist is . . .

This indicates that the quote Karin Silvia used is what had been said among physicists in the days when Wiener wrote the book.

Thus, I confirmed that the quote was not Wiener's own words. However, the reason I supposed was totally wrong. When I informed her of this finding, Karin Silvia thanked me for information and wrote also this: She thought that the quote was Wiener's own words because one of the Web page she saw it was "Mathematical Quotes" at the site of the Department of Mathematics, University of Pittsburgh. Doubting is often useful for learning, even if with wrong reasoning.

I thank Karin Silvia Franzoni Fornazier for her permission to use our written conversation in this essay.

The Mystery of Yukawa's "New Insight" (Second Revision)

2010-06-26T13:03:00.020+09:00

Hideki Yukawa described the climax of the development of his meson theory in his autobiography Tabibito [1]. However, this description is contradictory to the record of his academic presentation made more than a year before the date of climax. Study on this problem has revealed that two factors were responsible to this contradiction.

Yukawa's passage we treat is the following:

The crucial point came to me one night in October. The nuclear force is effective at extremely small distances, on the order of 0.02 trillionth of a centimeter. That much I knew already. My new insight was the realization that this distance and the mass of the new particle that I was seeking are inversely related to each other. Why had I not noticed that before?

"October" in this quote means that of 1934 according to the paragraph that precedes it. Note that his new insight means the realization of the inverse proportionality of the effective distance of the nuclear force (the force that binds neutrons and protons in the nuclei) to the mass of the new particle that mediates this force. Hereafter, we call this inverse proportionality distance-mass relation.

On the other hand, Yukawa made his first oral presentation at a meeting of the Physico-Mathematical Society of Japan held in Sendai in April, 1933. The title of the presentation was "A consideration about the problem of electrons within nuclei," and its abstract includes the following sentence [2]:

From the fact that the electron has the rest mass, we consider that the strength of the interaction decreases rapidly, as the distance between the neutron and the proton becomes large compared with h/(2πmc).

Here, we find that Yukawa used the distance-mass relation already in 1933. Thus, it is contradictory to call the realization in 1934 of this relation "my new insight".

We guess that the following two factors were responsible to the above contradiction.

1. Hisao Sawano of the Assahi Shimbun Company helped the publication of the Japanese version* of Tabibito by editing Yukawa's manuscript [3]. If Sawano's editing had been to such an extent as to change Yukawa's original version into more dramatic one here and there, then Sawano must have modified the passage about the climax without thinking that his change might contradict Yukawa's academic record.

2. In the work of his 1933 presentation, Yukawa treated the possibility that the electron might be the mediator of the nuclear force. This hypothesis included difficulties related to the spin and statistics of the electron. Therefore, Yukawa abandoned the hypothesis soon later. At the same time, he might also have discarded the distance-mass relation. If so, Yukawa had to rediscover it for completing the paper on the meson theory.

There are two accounts that support factor 1. One of them is Yukawa's passage in Ref. 4. He describes there that he finished writing the last section related to the discovery of the meson theory just a few hours before his trip to Europe. Perhaps, Yukawa regularly checked the changes made by Sawano in order for those not to be contradictory to facts. As for the last section, however, it is quite possible that Yukawa's trip to Europe made such a check impossible.

The other account is in the autobiographical book** [5] of Hideki Yukawa's wife, Sumi. She wrote about the days of their visit to Stockholm for Hideki's receiving Nobel Prize. On arriving at a hotel there, they found that many journalists were waiting to interview Hideki. Sumi's passage about part of the interview is as follows:

One of the questions addressed to him was this: "We hear that the Japanese people study sitting on their legs in a straw-matted room. Did you, Dr. Yukawa, write your paper sitting on your legs or sitting on a chair at the Western-style desk?" Hideki thought a little while and said, "I did in neither of those ways. I put my thoughts together at night in bed." This is true. Hideki wrote the paper that brought him Nobel Prize after he had kept thinking many nights at the age of 27 in the year of Shōwa 9 [Note by the translator: 1934]. This story seems to have wrongly come across to Japan. Thus, in Japan they believe that the idea flashed to him in the middle of a night.

This passage makes us think that the description in Ref. 1 about the sudden coming of the crucial point one night was a modification by Sawano, because it resembles the wrong information conveyed from Sweden to Japan. Further, we can consider that Sumi here denied the modified description indirectly. However, we should note Sumi's possible denial refers, in a strict sense, only to "that the idea flashed to him in the middle of a night." This is not relevant to the essential point of the contradiction, because what is contradictory is the content of the "new insight." This content is highly technical and possibly beyond Sawano's ability of rewriting. Therefore, factor 1 alone cannot be the cause of the contradiction.

With regard to factor 2, we find a strong support for this in Ref. 6, where Kawabe and Konuma write as follows:

In the manuscript of the presentation of April 1933, Yukawa corrected his idea in the abstract to read "the actual calculation does not yield this result." Further, in the draft "Bose electron theory" written almost at the same time as the above manuscript (it had been preserved in the file "Manuscripts of seminars and colloquia, 1934–1935"), he wrote, ". . . the term including the Compton wavelength of the electron appears as a kind of phase factor, . . . and, as a consequence, we cannot say the force decreases rapidly with increasing distance."

The above quote clearly shows that Yukawa once fully discarded the distance-mass relation and that the rediscovery of it was necessary.

The words "My new insight" in the quote from Ref. 1 is not the literal translation of the original words. The literal translation of the relevant passage would be as follows:

One night in early October, a thought flashed through my mind. The nuclear force has only an extremely short effective range. It is on the order of 0.02 trillionth of a centimeter. This has been known since earlier time. What I noticed is that this effective range and the mass of the new particle that accompanies the nuclear force would be inversely proportional to each other. Why did I not notice such a thing until then?

If we omit the last sentence in the above passage,*** the thought that flashed Yukawa's mind does not necessarily mean to be new; it can be the revival or the rediscovery of an earlier thought. Thus, the first and the last sentences in the Yukawa's original manuscript, before Sawano's modification, might have been:

In early October, a thought came to my mind. . . . Why did I not examine this again until then?

Then, the passage is a less dramatic depiction of the development of the meson theory but does not contradict to his earlier use of the distance-mass relation. Hideki Yukawa's own autobiography was translated into English, French and German. Therefore, the wrong version of the story modified by Sawano has become famous world over. This is unfortunate. Sumi Yukawa's account quoted above should be informed widely.

(This article owes much to the discussion we have had at Osaka Science Museum among the members of "Citizens' Study Group on Hideki Yukawa.")

Notes

* The Japanese version of Tabibito first appeared as a series of 112 stories in Asahi Shimbun from March to July, 1958.

** The title Kuraku-no-Sono was taken from the street name in Nishinomiya City, where Hideki and Sumi Yukawa lived in the years shortly after their marriage. It has the meaning of "the garden (sono) of joys and sorrows (kuraku)."

*** See also the same passage in the German version [7]: Eines Abends Anfang Oktober hatte ich mit einem Mal die richitige Idee. Die Kernkraft hat eine äußerst kurze Reichweite: nur 2/10-billionstel Zentimeter. Das wußte ich schon vorher. Was ich nun bemerkte, war vielmehr, daß die Reichweite und die Masse der zur Kernkraft gehörenden neuen Teilchen zueinander in umgekehrter Proportion stehen müßen. Warum war ich nicht schon eher darauf gekommen!

References

H. Yukawa, Tabibito (The Traveler), translated by L. Brown and R. Yoshida (World Scientific, 1982) p. 202.

H. Yukawa, Sūbutu-gakkaisi, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1933) quoted in Nihon-no Buturigaku-shi (History of Physics in Japan) (Tokai University Press, 1978) p. 319 (in Japanese; English translation of the quoted passage by the present author).
H. Yukawa, Atogaki (Afterwords) in Tabibito, (Kadokawa, 1960) (in Japanese).
H. Yukawa, Hon-no Naka-no Sekai (The World in Books) (Iwanami, 1963) p. 182 (in Japanese).
S. Yukawa, Kuraku-no-Sono (Kōdansha, Tokyo, 1976) pp. 349–350 (in Japanese; English translation of the quoted passage by the present author).
M. Kawabe and M. Konuma, Butsuri Vol. 37, p. 265 (1982) (in Japanese).
Hideki Yukawa: Tabibito - Ein Wanderer, Grosse Naturforscher Band 48, ed. Erwin Müller-Hartmann, transl. Claus M. Fischer, p. 175 (Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft, Stuttgart, 1985).

The Mystery of Yukawa's "New Insight" (Revised)

2010-05-26T15:50:00.005+09:00

Please read the Second Revision instead of this article, which is retained only as the record of the processes of my solving the mystery.

The crucial point in the development of Hideki Yukawa's meson theory came to him one night in October 1934. He writes in his autobiography Tabibito [1] as follows:

My new insight was the realization that this distance [the effective range of the nuclear force] and the mass of the new particle that I was seeking are inversely related to each other. Why had I not noticed that before?

This passage contradicts the fact that Yukawa used the above relation already in 1933. Namely, in April that year he made his first oral presentation at a meeting of an academic society. It was entitled "A consideration about the problem of electrons within nuclei," and the meeting was the one held in Sendai by Physico-Mathematical Society of Japan. The abstract of the presentation includes the following sentence [2]:

From the fact that the electron has the rest mass, we consider that the strength of the interaction decreases rapidly as the distance between the neutron and the proton becomes large compared with h/(2πmc).

In the work of the above presentation, Yukawa treated the possibility that the electron might be the mediator of the nuclear force between the neutron and the proton. This hypothesis included difficulties related to the spin and statistics of the electron. Therefore, Yukawa totally abandoned the hypothesis later together with the relation of the distance and the mass of the particle that would mediate the nuclear force [3]. Did this abandonment make it necessary for Yukawa to rediscover the relation? If so, this explains the contradictory remark of his "new insight."

We find another possible explanation of the contradictory description in the process of the making of Yukawa's autobiography. Hisao Sawano of the Assahi Shimbun Company helped the publication by editing Yukawa's manuscript [4]. If Sawano's editing had been to such an extent as to change Yukawa's original version into more dramatic one here and there, the passage that began with "My new insight" might have been Sawano's modification. To eliminate the expression different from the fact, Yukawa, perhaps, regularly checked the changes made by Sawano. However, Yukawa finished writing the last section related to the discovery of the meson theory just a few hours before his trip to Europe [5]. Thus, it is quite possible that Yukawa did not check Sawano's modification of that section.

Both Yukawa and Sawano are now in heaven. Thus, the mystery of the "new insight," i.e., which of the above two explanations was the case, does not seem to be solved easily. However, we have another clue to solve this problem.

In her autobiographical book* [6], Hideki Yukawa's wife, Sumi, wrote about the days of their visit to Stockholm for Hideki's receiving Nobel Prize. On arriving at a hotel there, they found that many journalists were waiting to interview Hideki. Sumi's passage about part of the interview is as follows:

One of the questions addressed to him was this: "We hear that the Japanese people study sitting on their legs in a straw-matted room. Did you, Dr. Yukawa, write your paper sitting on your legs or sitting on a chair at the Western-style desk?" Hideki thought a little while and said, "I did in neither of those ways. I put my thoughts together at night in bed." This is true. Hideki wrote the paper that brought him Nobel Prize after he had kept thinking many nights at the age of 27 in the year of Shōwa 9 [Note by the translator: 1934]. This story seems to have wrongly come across to Japan. Thus, in Japan they believe that the idea flashed to him in the middle of a night. [Translated by T.T. from Japanese.]

Here Sumi clearly denies the story in Ref. 1 of the "new insight" that came suddenly. Therefore, the second possibility given above, i.e., the contradiction is due to Sawano's modification, should be regarded as the case.

Hideki Yukawa's own autobiography was translated into English, French and German. Therefore, the wrong version of the story modified by Sawano has become famous world over. This is unfortunate. Sumi Yukawa's account quoted above should be informed widely.

(This article owes much to the discussion we have had at Osaka Science Museum among the members of "Citizens' Study Group on Hideki Yukawa.")

Note

* The title Kuraku-no-Sono was taken from the street name in Nishinomiya City, where Hideki and Sumi Yukawa lived in the years shortly after their marriage. It has the meaning of "the garden (sono) of joys and sorrows (kuraku)."

References

H. Yukawa, Tabibito (The Traveler), translated by L. Brown and R. Yoshida (World Scientific, 1982) p. 202.
H. Yukawa, Sūbutu-gakkaisi, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1933) quoted in Nihon-no Buturigaku-shi (History of Physics in Japan) (Tokai University Press, 1978) p. 319 (in Japanese; English translation of the quoted passage by the present author).
M. Kawabe and M. Konuma, Butsuri Vol. 37, p. 265 (1982) (in Japanese).
H. Yukawa, Atogaki (Afterwords) in Tabibito, (Kadokawa, 1960) (in Japanese).
H. Yukawa, Hon-no Naka-no Sekai (The World in Books) (Iwanami, 1963) p. 182 (in Japanese).
S. Yukawa, Kuraku-no-Sono (Kōdansha, Tokyo, 1976) pp. 349–350 (in Japanese).

The Solution to the Mystery of Yukawa's "New Insight"

2010-05-25T16:06:00.009+09:00

Previously I wrote the article [1] that can be summarized as follows:

According to his autobiography [2], Yukawa arrived at a crucial point in the development of his meson theory one night in October 1934 by getting a "new insight." It was about the relation between the effective range of the nuclear force and the mass of the new particle he was seeking. However, this contradicts the fact that he used this relation already in 1933. There are two possibilities to explain the contradiction: (1) Yukawa once thoroughly abandoned the idea in which he used the relation, so that he had to rediscover it. (2) The description in Ref. 2 is the change made by Hisao Sawano of the Asahi Shimbun Company, who helped the publication of the autobiography by editing Yukawa's manuscript. Both Yukawa and Sawano passed, and the mystery of the "new insight," i.e., which of the above two explanations was the case, cannot be solved easily.

Reading the autobiographical book* [3] written by Hideki Yukawa's wife, Sumi, I have found a clue to solve the above mystery. Sumi wrote about the days of their visit to Stockholm for Hideki's receiving Nobel Prize. On arriving at a hotel there, they found that many journalists were waiting to interview Hideki. Sumi writes as follows:

One of the questions addressed to him was this: "We hear that the Japanese people study sitting on their legs in a straw-matted room. Did you, Dr. Yukawa, write your paper sitting on your legs or sitting on a chair at the Western-style desk?" Hideki thought a little while and said, "I did in neither of those ways. I put my thoughts together at night in bed." This is true. Hideki wrote the paper that brought him Nobel Prize after he had kept thinking many nights at the age of 27 in the year of Shōwa 9 [Note by T.T.; 1934]. This story seems to have wrongly come across to Japan. Thus, in Japan they believe that the idea flashed to him in the middle of a night. [Translated by T.T. from Japanese.]

This passage by Sumi clearly denies the story in Ref. 2 of the "new insight" that came suddenly. Therefore, the possibility (2) given above should be regarded as the case.

Hideki Yukawa's own autobiography was translated into English, French and German. Therefore, the wrong version of the story modified by Sawano, "The crucial point came to me one night in October. … My new insight was …" has become famous world over. This is unfortunate. Sumi Yukawa's account quoted above should be informed widely.

Note

* The title Kuraku-no-Sono was taken from the street name in Nishinomiya City, where Hideki and Sumi Yukawa lived in the years shortly after their marriage. It has the meaning of "the garden (sono) of joys and sorrows (kuraku)."

References

The Mystery of Yukawa's "New Insight," Ted's Coffeehouse (February 27, 2010).
H. Yukawa, Tabibito (The Traveler), translated by L. Brown and R. Yoshida (World Scientific, 1982) p. 202.
S. Yukawa, Kuraku-no-Sono (Kōdansha, Tokyo, 1976) in Japanese.

Feynman vs Rembrandt

2010-05-07T09:47:00.004+09:00

The Novel-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman was born on May 11, 1918. In May, therefore, he is "the physicist of this month." The May-2010 issue of APS News [1] carries, on its first page, the sketch of a young lady under the title, "Who created this drawing?" The second and last sentence of its caption makes the reader go to page 5.

On page 5, we find a short article with a witty title, "Feynman drew more than diagrams," and a photo. The photo shows four more drawings and two persons, APS President Curtis Callan and his colleague Igor Klebanov. The article explains the followings: The drawing on page 1 was done in 1985 by celebrated Caltech physicist Richard Feynman and that it is one of several that are now at Princeton in the possession of Callan. The works were acquired in the mid-eighties by Princeton, where Feynman had been a graduate student, and were kept in the office of the late Sam Treiman, from whom Callan received them.

The bottom line of the article is as follows:

In the opinion of experts, Feynman was at least as good at drawing as Rembrandt was at physics.

This sentence seems to imply in a humorous manner that Feynman's drawings are pretty mediocre from the viewpoint of experts. To be sure about this, we have to see to what extent Rembrandt studied physics.

In the description of Wikipedia [2], we find that Rembrandt attended Latin school and was enrolled at the University of Leiden. However, he soon apprenticed to painters and then opened a studio at the age of 18 or so. Therefore, it might be safe to conclude that Rembrandt learned little about physics.

From cautiousness, I made Internet search by the combination of the words Rembrandt and physics; and found the article [3] entitled "The Rembrandt Solution" (the report does not include the word "physics," but one of comments on it does). It is about a technique developed by Rembrandt and other painters and called countershading. This technique creates the illusion of greater dynamic range of light intensities in their paintings than in real scenery. Illusion is the sensory distortion of the physical world. In order to utilize the effect of illusion, painters should know about the relationship between the nature of human senses and physical signals. Then, Rembrandt must have had sharp physical insight. Namely, Rembrandt's drawing technique makes us think that he was fairly adept at physics.

How can we argue about Feynman's goodness at drawing from his physics, conversely? Does his famous invention of Feynman diagrams prove the quality of his artistic skill? This seems to be difficult, though the invention at least indicates that his method of thinking was geometric as well as analytic. Is there any decent idea about this? I expect comments from readers.

APS News, Vol. 19, No. 5 (2010).
"Rembrandt," Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (6 May 2010 at 00:13).
G. Randall, "The Rembrandt solution: What painting’s grand masters can teach today’s digital photographers" (2009).

On the Day I Shouted His Name ... (2)

2010-05-02T19:49:00.004+09:00

Inoue wrote more than 60 dramas as well as many novels and essays. I have read none of them but have the book of collected photos, "Hisashi Inoue's Dalian*" [1], edited by Inoue and his theatrical troupe Komatsuza. Opening the book, I found Inoue's essay entitled "Dalian, the Dream Town." Reading this essay for the first time, I learned the relationship between Inoue and Dalian from it. I guessed that the photos in the book should have been part of collected data for a drama. However, the relationship had started much earlier. It was when one of his best friends moved to a primary school in Dalian and sent Inoue a picture card of Dalian in the winter of 1943. (I also moved to a primary school in Dalian in September 1944; namely, the friend of Inoue's and I had a similar experience. I bought this book to look at images of old Dalian dear to me.)

On the basis of his thought about Dalian, Inoue made a drama entitled "Enshō and Shinshō." Komatsuza made the first performance of this drama in 2005. It is about this story: Raconteurs Kokontei Shinshō and San'yutei Enshō went for performances in Manchuria** during the war time and were induced to stay in Dalian because of Japan's defeat. They had to do different and difficult jobs to live there for 600 days before coming back to Japan.

The last passage of Inoue's essay is as follows: 'The word "Dalian, the Dream Town" that entered deep in me as a child would not disappear until my death while its meaning is changing." One of the changes was due to his concern about Chinese people who had to live on the outskirts of Dalian when the city was part of Japan's borrowed land. Here we find Inoue's pacifism that made him one of initial members of the Article 9 Association.

Praying for his peaceful sleep in heaven, I wish to follow his footsteps in the efforts to keep Article 9*** of the Constitution of Japan and extend the renunciation of war all over the world.

Notes

* Dalian is a beautiful port city in the Northeast China. It was in the region of the land borrowed by Japan until August 1945, the time of Japan's defeated in the second World War.

** The historical name of the present Northeast China.

*** 1) Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.

2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

Reference

H. Inoue and Komatsuza, ed., Hisashi Inoue's Dalian (Shōgakukan, 2002).

On the Day I Shouted His Name ... (1)

2010-04-15T09:25:00.008+09:00

The ninth (sometimes the eighth or tenth) day of the month is the day for the petition campaign of our "Fukuizumi-Ōtori Article 9 Association (FOA9)." The FOA9 is one of about 7500 local and office groups that support the Article 9 Association. In the morning of April 9, 2010, I went for the campaign together with colleagues of FOA9 and shouted through a microphone, "Hisashi Inoue, Kenzaburō Ōe, the late Shuichi Kato and others established the Article 9 Association. Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution declares the renunciation of war as a means of settling international disputes. The purpose of the Association is to keep Article 9, shine its light upon this turbulent world and join hands with the peace-seeking citizens of the world," and so on.

That evening Hisashi Inoue, a leading Japanese playwright and writer of comic fiction, died of lung cancer. He was active not only in art and literature but also in anti-nuclear and peace movements. The number of inaugural members of the Article 9 Association was nine. Members other than Inoue were as follows; Takeshi Umehara (philosopher), Kenzaburo Ōe (Nobel-Prize winning novelist), Yasuhiro Okudaira (Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo and researcher of constitutions), Makoto Oda (novelist and peace activist), Shuichi Kato (critic and author), Hisae Sawachi (non-fiction writer), Shunsuke Tsurumi (philosopher) and Mutusko Miki (wife of the late Takeo Miki, former Prime Minister). We had already lost two of them, Oda and Kato, and Inoue was the third. However, I believe that the movement to shine the light of Article 9 upon the world would become stronger and stronger than ever. (To be continued.)

Rivals

2010-03-09T16:51:00.019+09:00

At the Vancouver Winter Olympics, Yu-na Kim of South Korea took the gold medal of women's figure skating competition with a world record score; and Mao Asada of Japan, the silver. Both of them played beautifully and are only 19 years old. Further, they have been rivals each other since quite young days. Thus, their rivalry will perhaps continue through coming years. This reminds me of the relationship between Hideki Yukawa and Shi'nichiro Tomonaga.

Before his publishing of the paper on the meson theory, Yukawa had the days of slowdown in his research at the Department of Physics, Osaka University. Then Hidetsugu Yagi, the then Head of the Department and known by Yagi antenna, said to him, "We had the plan of recruiting Tomonaga but your brother's request compelled us to adopt you. Therefore, we should be in trouble if you do not work harder than Tomonaga." These words stimulated Yukawa soon to complete the research on the prediction of the existence of the meson (this story has been translated and adapted from [1]). He got Nobel Prize in Physics for that work in 1949. Tomonaga shared the same award in 1965 with Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman for their work in quantum electrodynamics.

I also had some rivals in studying during my schoolboy days. They were mostly girls. Among them, one has been the enduring rival, though our specialties have been quite different. She studied Japanese literature in Edo period and is now Professor Emeritus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, while I am a little proud of publications in many different academic journals ranging from physics to psychology. I rarely meet her or exchange messages with her but am grateful to her for continued rivalry.

(Noticing of [1] owes to the discussion we have had at Osaka Science Museum among the members of "Citizens' Study Group on Hideki Yukawa.")

Note added later: Mao Asada beat Kim Yu-na to win her second title at the World Figure Skating Championships held in Turin, Italy, on March 27, 2010.

R. Utiyama's writing, quoted in: "Light" into after-war darkness, Asahi Shimbun, special pages for its 120th anniversary (February 13, 1999) in Japanese.

The Poetic Answer in the Science Test

2010-03-02T08:07:00.008+09:00

On February 20, the column of the Asahi Shimbun, "Tensei jingo," treated the nearing of spring. The column began by the question, "What does ice become when it melts?" This was a question in a science test at a primary school in Japan. The teacher expected the answer, "water." However, the question written in Japanese was rather vague, because it was close to this: What does it become when ice melts? Thus, there was a story that a child wrote the answer, "spring." The author of the column wrote this story once before, without being sure of its veracity.

However, the author received a letter from a lady reader, who had been in Supporo, a snowy large city in Hokkaido, as a child. The letter included a multicolor photocopy of a science test. In fact, it was of sepia color, showing the oldness of the test paper. One of the test question was "What does it become when snow melts?" The answer written in pencil was "The ground appears and it becomes spring." The teacher did not consider the answer as correct, and her overall test score was 85 out of 100. The reader wrote that her late mother had held on the paper and that she found it among the belongings left by the latter.

The author concluded the article by the words, 'Yesterday (February 19) it was "rain water" of 24 solar terms in East Asian lunisolar calendars. It signals the beginning of the spring thaw. After just a little of patient waiting, spring is coming again in order to make the child's "wrong answer" right.'

If I were a science teacher who asked the aforementioned question, I would have regarded the poetic answer of "spring" correct. Following the conventional wisdom only, we cannot make scientific discoveries. For fostering scientific mind, teachers should put much importance on children's original answers.

Note: Usually the English version "Vox Populi, Vox Dei" of the "Tensei jingo" column appears online soon after the publication of the Japanese version. However, the English version of the article here mentioned appeared nine days later (March 1) with the title "Hidden buds stir, eager for spring thawing." Thus, I prepared the story included in it by my own translation from the Japanese version, borrowing some expressions from the official English translation after finding it but retaining the others as prepared. The explanation of the vagueness of the relevant question, when expressed in Japanese, is mine.

The Mystery of Yukawa's "New Insight"

2010-02-27T16:00:00.020+09:00

Please read the revised version instead of this article:
The Mystery of Yukawa's "New Insight" (Revised).

Read in Japanese.
(The Japanese version has not yet been revised.)

The crucial point in the development of Hideki Yukawa's meson theory came to him one night in October 1934. He writes in his autobiography Tabibito [1] as follows:

My new insight was the realization that this distance [the effective range of the nuclear force] and the mass of the new particle that I was seeking are inversely related to each other. Why had I not noticed that before?

From the fact that the electron has the rest mass, we consider that the strength of the interaction decreases rapidly as the distance between the neutron and the proton becomes large compared with h/(2πmc).

We find another possible explanation of the contradictory description in the process of the making of Yukawa's autobiography. Hisao Sawano of the Asahi Shimbun Company helped the publication by editing Yukawa's manuscript [4]. If Sawano's editing had been to such an extent as to change Yukawa's original version into more dramatic one here and there, the passage that began with "My new insight" might have been Sawano's creation. To eliminate the expression different from the fact, Yukawa, perhaps, regularly checked the changes made by Sawano. However, Yukawa finished writing the last section related to the discovery of the meson theory just a few hours before his trip to Europe [5]. Thus, it is quite possible that Yukawa did not check Sawano's modification of that section.

Both Yukawa and Sawano are now in heaven, and the mystery of the "new insight," i.e., which of the above two explanations was the case, cannot be solved easily.

(This article owes much to the discussion we have had at Osaka Science Museum among the members of "Citizens' Study Group on Hideki Yukawa.")

Read the continuation of this article: The Solution to the Mystery of Yukawa's "New Insight"

H. Yukawa, Tabibito (The Traveler), translated by L. Brown and R. Yoshida (World Scientific, 1982) p. 202.
H. Yukawa, Sūbutu-gakkaisi, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1933) quoted in Nihon-no Buturigaku-shi (History of Physics in Japan) (Tokai University Press, 1978) p. 319 (in Japanese; English translation of the quoted passage by the present author).
M. Kawabe and M. Konuma, Butsuri Vol. 37, p. 265 (1982) (in Japanese).
H. Yukawa, Atogaki (Afterwords) in Tabibito, (Kadokawa, 1960) (in Japanese).
H. Yukawa, Hon-no Naka-no Sekai (The World in Books) (Iwanami, 1963) p. 182 (in Japanese).

Effects of Chinese Classic Literature on H. Yukawa's Work

2010-01-25T08:32:00.013+09:00

The following is the outline of my talk to be delivered at Himeji Kyoyukai meeting on February 18, 2010, in Himeji.

The Nobel-winning physicist Hideki Yukawa developed the theory of elementary domains for particle physics together with his coworkers in his later years [1, 2]. In the preface of a book [3], he writes that the important factor that led him to the idea of this theory was the words of the Chinese poet Li Po (701–762), "Heaven and Earth are hotels for everything, and days and nights are travelers of hundreds of generations." He also writes that scientific research and literature are not separate things for him.

Yukawa also writes in a textbook on particle physics [4] that Li Po's words mentioned above was one of the motivations that brought his unconscious idea about the elementary domains to his consciousness. While being rather lengthy for introducing the concept of the elementary domains in a textbook, the paragraphs including the above words are considered the valuable record of Yukawa's processes of thinking.

In his lecture on experimental nuclear physics, Kiichi Kimura, a classmate of Yukawa's at Kyoto University, told us that some words in the Taoist book Zhuangzi might have been a hint on Yukawa's meson theory that brought him the Nobel Prize. I do not remember the words Kimura quoted from Zhuangzi. In his 1961 essay [5] on Zhuangzi, however, Yukawa writes that he had read Taoist books Zhuangzi and Laozi in his middle school days, but was forgetting philosophical thoughts in them for many years after that. This means: When he was thinking about meson theory, Yukawa was forgetting Zhuangzi. Thus, the words of Zhuangzi Kimura mentioned had not been a direct hint, at least, on the idea of the meson.

It was reported [6] that the meson theory had been motivated by the occasion of the childbirth of Yukawa's wife. Namely, the judo expert Sachio Ashida remembered to have been told in a commuting tramcar by Yukawa, "A baby can exert an attractive force between the parents. There may be a similar existence in the nucleus." I suppose that this was Yukawa's jocular explanation of his idea for the layperson. Yukawa should have gotten the idea of the meson from the study of earlier papers by Werner Heisenberg and Enrico Fermi together with the analogy of the electromagnetic field mediated by the photon. Note here that he used a good analogy.

In his essay mentioned above [5], Yukawa writes that he reminded himself of an allegory in Zhuangzi when he was thinking about something at a deeper level than "elementary particles," which amounted to more than 30 kinds those days. The allegory was about the king who lacked all the seven holes in the face, i.e., ears, eyes, nostrils and a mouth, and was named Chaos ("Konton" in Japanese). The underdeveloped state of the king was appropriate for Yukawa to express his idea of something at a deeper level.

Yukawa also liked the following words from Zhuangzi: "On the basis of the beauty of Heaven and Earth, we arrive at the reason of everything." He made these words in Chinese characters use as a watermark of the invitation letter for "International Meeting on Elementary Particles: The Thirtieth Anniversary of the Meson Theory" [7].

To develop a new theory in the field of particle physics, it is necessary to have good mathematical skill of formulating equations to express a physical model, as well as strong imaginative power to think of a new model. One of the important device with which Yukawa cultivated the latter ability should have been Chinese classic literature, which includes a lot of allegories and helps one to develop thinking by the use of an analogy. Thus his reading of Chinese classic literatures in his young days was useful not only directly for the idea of elementary domains, but, quite possibly, also indirectly for the idea of the meson.

(This article owes much to the discussion we have had at Osaka Science Museum among the members of "Citizens' Study Group on Hideki Yukawa.")

References

Y. Katayama and H. Yukawa, "Field Theory of Elementary Domains and Particles. I" Progress of Theoretical Physics Supplement No. 41, p. 1 (1968).
Y. Katayama, I. Umemura and H. Yukawa, "Field Theory of Elementary Domains and Particles. II" ibid. p. 22 (1968).
H. Yukawa, Auto-selection of Hideki Yukawa's Essays Vol. 5 (Asahi-shimbun, Tokyo, 1971) [in Japanese].
H. Yukawa, Unified Theories of Particles, in Iwanami Lectures: Foundations of Modern Physics, Vol. 11, H. Yukawa and Y. Katayama, ed., p. 563 (Iwanami, Tokyo, 1974) [in Japanese].
H. Yukawa, Zhuangzi, in Auto-selection of Hideki Yukawa's Essays Vol. 3, p. 363 (Asahi-shimbun, Tokyo, 1971) [in Japanese].
Personal connections in Japan: The spirit of Judo (8), Asahi-shimbun, Evening issue (May 25, 2006) [in Japanese].
The 30th anniversary of Meson theory (1), Asahi-shimbun (September 20, 1965) [in Japanese].

Hideki Matsui Won MVP

2009-11-08T13:35:00.003+09:00

The New York Yankees won the 27th World Series title on Wednesday, November 4, 2009. The designated hitter Hideki Matsui (35 years old), drove in six of the Yankee's seven runs in their series-winning victory. He hit .615 with three home runs and eight RBIs in the series, and became the first Japanese-born World Series Most Valuable player. Matui was reported to have said, "Winning the championship is such a great feeling. I guess you can say that this is the best moment of my life right now."

In the summer of 1992, Matsui, as the fourth batter of Seiryo Senior High School team drew five intentional walks in a game at Koshien Stadium. It was the very uncommon strategy of the opposite team not to make him hit home runs and to win cunningly. I watched that game on TV and impressed by Matsui, who did not show any look of embarrassment or angriness and coolly walked to the first base each time. Such a broad mind of Matsui and his continued effort, I believe, has brought him this best moment of his life. I am especially proud of him because I was born in the same prefecture of Ishikawa as he.

Nobel Peace Prize for Words?

2009-10-10T20:49:00.002+09:00

President Barack Obama has been chosen to be the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples" [1]. The press release of the Norwegian Nobel Committee says, "The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons."

In the preface of my book just printed (see the previous article at this blog site), I wrote, "For the realization of this [eternal peace all over the world], we should attach importance to the following words, the sources of which you might guess easily." Then I quoted Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan and Obama's Prague speech on nuclear weapons delivered on April 5, 2009.

On hearing the news of the Peace Prize yesterday evening, however, I wondered if the awarding to Obama was too early because there has been no fruit of his words yet. The New York Times reported the news of the Prize under the title "Surprise Nobel for Obama stirs praise and doubts" [2].

Questions about the earliness of awarding Obama was also raised during the Prize announcement. In answer to them, Norwegian Nobel Committee President Thorbjørn Jagland replied that the Committee wanted to demonstrate its support for the approaches Obama is taking towards global problems [3].

Today I got an e-mail message from the not-for-profit global campaigning organization Avaaz.org, which requested signing the petition for pressing Obama to turn hope into action [4]. They write, "Only by following through with courageous, transformative action for peace can Obama fulfill his promise – and only then will history judge that this Nobel Peace Prize is truly deserved." I completely agree with them and signed the petition.

The Nobel Peace Prize for 2009, Nobelprize.org (October 9, 2009).
Surprise Nobel for Obama stirs praise and doubts, New York Times (October 10, 2009).
Time for Hope, Speed Read page for Nobel Peace Prize 2009 (October 9, 2009).
Obama for peace: Turn hope into action

My First Book

2009-10-09T14:16:00.005+09:00

The above image shows the cover of my first nonacademic book made at my own expense. In a small number of academic books included in my list of publications, I made partial contributions only. Therefore, this can also be said to be "my" first book." It is entitled "Passage through Spacetime: Random Writings of a Physicist" (Jupiter Corporation, Tokyo, 2009), and is written in English. A friend of mine from Dalian Reizen Elementary School, Takashi Oshio, coordinated the publication for me.

The contents are as follows:

Preface
Part I. Hello Mr. Feynman!
　1. What Little I Know about Feynman
　2. We See Feynman Everywhere
Part II. Book Reviews
　Fiction
　Biography
　Essays
　Religion and Philosophy
　Cosmology
　Life Science
　Mathematics
　Physics
Part III. Vicky: A Novella
　Sorekara and Sanshiro
　Write to You instead of Sam
　Just a "Good-bye"
　Reunions
　The New Year Card
　Stupid Idea?
Index

All the writings contained have been on my Web site for many years, and polishing has been made on this occasion.

The book is not for sale but will be distributed to my friends and acquaintances. Internet friends of mine are welcomed to request a copy by writing their postal address to my e-mail address, which is shown on the top bar of this site.

The Consideration of Balancing

2009-10-08T11:33:00.004+09:00

The winners of Nobel Prize in Physics 2009 are as follows [1]: Charles K. Kao, Standard Telecommunication Laboratories in Harlow, England, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, for "groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication," and Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, both from Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N. J., USA, for "the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit &#; the CCD sensor."

About ten years ago, I learned that the CCD (charge-coupled device) had become an important tool for astronomical observation and even in my own field of radiation measurement, but knew neither the researchers who contributed to the development of this device nor the fact that it revolutionized personal electronics. Also, I have learned about optical fibers but not about the person who was a pioneer in that field. So it is good that we now learn about those persons owing to the awarding of the Nobel Prize to them.

Last year, three Japanese-born physicists, Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago, Makoto Kobayashi of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba, and Toshihide Maskawa of Kyoto Sangyo University and the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for their theoretical work in particle physics. It is said that their discoveries were much more obscure to the everyday consumer [2]. By contrast, the discoveries of this year's winners were closely related to practical applications to things around us. Here we see the deep consideration of balancing by the Nobel committee for physics.

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2009, Nobelprize.org (October 6, 2009).
J. Matson, Nobel Prize in Physics Goes to Pioneer in Fiber Optics and Inventors of Digital Image Sensor, ScientificAmerican.com (October 6, 2009).

Ichiro's Record Based on Daily Care

2009-09-16T09:29:00.006+09:00

Seattle Mariners outfielder Ichiro Suzuki reached 200 hits for the ninth consecutive season on Sunday, September 13, 2009, with an infield single. Thus he broke the Major League Baseball (MLB) record owned by Willie Keeler since 1901. You can read more about Ichiro's accomplishment at the Web site of MLB [1].

One of Ichiro's teammates Kenji Jojima told a reporter about the secrets of Ichiro's successful batting as follows [2]:

For example, Ichiro's chair at the clubhouse in our home city is a common one made of pipes, though we have comfortable sofas. Ichiro says, "Sitting on a spongy chair for a long time gives me a stress on my waist." . . . As for the pathway from the clubhouse to the baseball ground, Ichiro has his own choice. There are steps and a slope, and he always uses the latter for going up and down. During the four years of my observing him, he has not changed this behavior. Walking on the steps has the possibility of slipping and causing a sprain when one has spike shoes. . . . On coming back to the bench after hitting a home run, Ichiro says to me, "Jo, did my back look like pleased?" I say, "Yes, it did." Hearing this, he says with a bitter smile, "Then I'm not yet good enough." Such a deed with emotion appearing outside the body as running joyfully is a bad thing for him. . . . (Translated from Japanese by the author.)

Ichro's wonderful record is based on such great daily care of his body and mind. I was much more impressed by Jojima's talk than by the news of Ichiro's breaking of the MLB record after 108 years.

References

"Chasing History: 9 Consecutive Seasons with 200 Hits," mlb.com.
K. Jojima, "Let's talk on Ichiro (1)," Asahi-shimbun (September 15, 2009).

Bolt's New 200-m Record and the Limiting Value

2009-08-24T16:21:00.005+09:00

Fitting an exponential function to the data on men's 200 m world record progression.

On August 20, 2009, the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt set again a world record of 19.19 seconds in the 200-m sprint at the World Championships held in Berlin, adding to the gold he won in the 100 m.

I have taken the data on men's 200-m world record from Ref. 1, and have tried the least squares fit of an exponential function to the data. The best-fit curve obtained are shown in the above figure together with the data used. The result shows that the limiting value of the record would be 18.81 seconds.

The computation of the fit has also yielded the probable error of plus or minus 0.52 seconds for this value, though the error larger than plus 0.38 seconds cannot actually happen. This indicates that the accuracy of the prediction of the limiting value by such curve fitting is quite poor.

Reference

"Men's 200 metres world record progression," Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (24 August 2009 at 01:02)

Last revised: August 26, 2009.

Hawking Was Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom

2009-08-22T13:13:00.004+09:00

A ceremony of handing the Presidential Medal of Freedom from U. S. President, Barack Obama, to its recipients was performed on August 12, 2009. The Presidential Medal of Freedom is America's highest medal awarded to civilians in the world. In Japan, they broadcast this news on NHK TV, but highlighted only one of the recipients, Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow.

Dr. Crow, 95 years old, is the last living Plains Indian war chief, and author of works on Native American history and culture who has served as an inspiration to young Native Americans across the country [1]. Surely, the choice of him is symbolic of Obama's attitude to value the diversity of society. Regrettably, however, I could not learn from the broadcast that Stephen Hawking was also among 16 recipients. I learned it later from other news sources [2, 3].

Hawking is an internationally-recognized theoretical physicist who has a severe physical disability due to motor neuron disease (for more details, see his Web site [4]). In addition to his pioneering academic research in mathematics and physics, his citation [5] refers to the fact that he penned three popular science books, including the bestselling A Brief History of Time. It also mentions about his publication of a children’s science book with his daughter as well as his unlocking new pathways to discovery and inspiring everyday citizens.

K. Brandon, "2009 Medal of Freedom Recipients," The Briefing Room Blog of the White House (July 30, 2009).
H. Johnston, "Hawking hits the headlines in the US…," physicsworld.com blog (August 13, 2009).
G. P. Collins, "Stephen Hawking receives Presidential Medal of Freedom," scientificamerican blog (August 14, 2009).
"Professor Stephen Hawking."
"President Obama Names Medal of Freedom Recipients: 16 Agents of Change to Receive Top Civilian Honor," The Briefing Room of the White House (July 30, 2009).

Bolt's World Record Changes Empirical Prediction Again

2009-08-18T15:21:00.007+09:00

World record progression for men's 100 m. Data, from Ref. 1; dotted line, least-squares fit of exponential function to data through 2005; dashed line, fit to data through 2008; and solid line, fit to data through 2009. (You can see the real size image by clicking on the image).

Until the year of 2005, the plot of the world record for men's 100 m sprint as a function of year allowed a good fit by an exponential function with an additive constant, value of which meant the possible limiting value of the record. The data through 2005 gave the limiting value of 9.66 seconds. The data through 2008, however, predicted an improved limiting value of 9.43 seconds owing much to Usain Bolt's record, in the Beijing Olympic Games, of 9.69 seconds, which was one of outliers with respect to the fitted curve (Ref. 2).

Now his record of 9.58 seconds in Berlin on August 16, 2009, again changed the limiting value down to 9.09 seconds (with errors of plus or minus 0.49 seconds). When a single new record affects the possible limiting value this much, it would mean the following two facts: (1) The application of exponential fitting to data on men's 100 m sprint is completely inadequate. (2) Bolt's running ability is extraordinarily and exceptionally wonderful.

Notes added later:

Originally the title of this article was "Bolt's World Record Changes Statistical Prediction Again," but I replaced the word "Statistical" by "Empirical." The reason is this: The method used is often called statistical, but I think it better to be called empirical. Further, I'm not a statistician but a maker of empirical formulas.

A related blog article appeared: Michael Banks, Bolt out of the blue, physicsworld. com (August 17, 2009).

Read also Bolt's New 200-m Record and the Limiting Value.

"World record progression 100 metres men," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (18 August 2009 at 00:44).

"World Records for Men's 100 m Defy Simple Curve Fitting (2)" Femto-Essays (September 14, 2008).

Last revised: August 24, 2009.

Cartoon-Like Pictures in Particle Physics

2009-07-22T08:59:00.002+09:00

The Web site of American Physical Society has the pages entitled Physical Review Focus, on which selections from the journals Physical Review and Physical Review Letters are explained for students and researchers in all fields of physics. Besides such selections, the pages also carry "Landmarks," which introduce important papers from the archives of Physical Review.

A recent article [1] of Physical Review Focus treated Richard Feynman's paper in 1949 [2]. In this paper Feynman used for the first time cartoon-like pictures (examples can be seen in [1]; explanations are given in [3]) of straight and wiggly lines representing real and virtual particles interacting each other ("virtual particles" appear in intermediate, unobservable, stages of a process, and work as the mediators of the forces of interactions). The pictures enabled him to obtain easy answers to difficult problems in quantum electrodynamics. Then these so-called Feynman diagrams quickly became an essential tool for particle physicists, and Feynman shared the Nobel Prize with Sin'itiro Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger in 1965 (the independent work by the latter two physicists were published in [4] and [5]).

Generally, visualizing the images of new concepts often helps one understand those concepts quickly. Feynman diagrams, which translate the essence of complicated mathematical expressions into simple pictures, are therefore a good and indispensable device in studying the mystery of the deep physics in the microscopic world.

Landmarks: Powerful Pictures, Physical Review Focus Vol. 24, Story 3 (July 20, 2009).
R. P. Feynman, "Space-Time Approach to Quantum Electrodynamics," Phys. Rev. Vol. 76, p. 769 (1949).
Feynman Diagrams Virtual Visitor Center, SLAC, Stanford University.
S. Tomonaga and J. R. Oppenheimer, "On Infinite Field Reactions in Quantum Field Theory," Phys. Rev. Vol. 74, p. 224 (1948).
J. Schwinger, "Quantum Electrodynamics. I. A Covariant Formulation," Phys. Rev. Vol. 74, p. 1439 (1948).

Feynman's Lectures on Microsoft Web Site

2009-07-20T08:20:00.004+09:00

An article [1] of physicsworld.com has reported that Bill Gates has bought the rights to seven lectures by the late Richard Feynman, which were filmed by the BBC in 1964 — a year before Feynman shared the Nobel Prize in Physics [with Sin'itiro Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger] — and that you can watch them for free at [2]. All we need to do is download and install a bit of software from Microsoft, which takes us a minute or two.

Feynman presented these lectures as the Messenger Lectures at Cornell University in the United States. Titles of them are

The Law of Gravitation, an example of Physical Law

The Relation of Mathematics to Physics

The Great Conservation Principles

Symmetry in Physical Law

The Distinction of Past and Future

Probability and Uncertainty the Quantum Mechanical Law of Nature

Seeking New Laws

Under the movie we can read Feynman's words, so that non-native speakers of English who are unaccustomed to listening lectures in English can well enjoy these lectures. The Messenger Series of lectures is also available as a book [3]. In the foreword of the book, we read, to our astonishment, that Feynman delivered these lectures not from a prepared manuscript but extempore from a few notes.

H. Johnston, Watch Richard Feynman’s lectures for free, physicsworld.com blog (July 17, 2009).
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html#
R. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (Penguin, 2007).

Recent Visitors by Country

2009-05-22T14:39:00.010+09:00

Each of three blog sites of mine at blogger.com (two in English and one in Japanese) has a counter provided by sitemeter.com. At the site of sitemeter.com, we can see the country share of the latest 99 visitors to each of our own site. The numbers I saw today for my blog sites written in English are as follows (Japan has been excluded from the list, because a considerable number of my own visits for check and correction purposes are included):

"Surely You're Joking" site (Visitors No. 3254–No. 3352)

1	United States	34%
2	United Kingdom	5%
3	Costa Rica	3%
3	Netherlands	3%
5	China	2%
5	Germany	2%
5	Portugal	2%
5	India	2%

Countries at the 1% level are Canada, Indonesia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, Philippines, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland.

"Femto-Essays" site (Visitors No. 7366–No. 7364)

1	United States	25%
2	Canada	6%
3	India	5%
4	Brazil	4%
5	United Kingdom	3%
5	China	3%
7	Australia	2%
7	France	2%
7	Romania	2%
7	Philippines	2%

Countries at the 1% level are Bangladesh, Denmark, Estonia, Italy, Kuwait, Mexico, Morocco, Panama, Singapore and Ukraine.

Got an E-mail Message about Kazumi

2009-04-09T15:13:00.002+09:00

Last Friday I got an e-mail message about Kazumi from one of his ex-student, Lian Chen. I quote it below by his permission.

Dear Prof. Tabata:

Thanks a lot for your writing about Prof. Kazumi Maki. I was a Ph. D student with Prof. Maki in period 1985-1989. During his sabbatical year 1986–-1987 I went to Max-Planck Institute in Stuttgart Germany. I know Prof. Maki won the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt senior scientists award for his stay at that year in Germany. They also bought a grand piano at the end of his sabbatical and shipped back to US. Both Prof. Maki and Masako were very nice to us as a student at the time. I'm sad that Kazumi has past.

Sincerely yours,
Liang Chen
Department of Physics
University of Ottawa
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada K1N6N5

I suppose that the grand piano mentioned by Liang must have been a gift from Kazumi to Masako on the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of their wedding. I have never sent such a great gift to my wife!

Kazumi Maki (1936−2008)

2008-12-29T17:06:00.042+09:00

Kazumi Maki in August 1995.

In response to my season's greetings to Dr. and Mrs. Kazumi Maki, I received a piece of sad news from Masako, Kazumi's wife, today. She wrote me the following story (rewritten here in my words):

"Kazumi got surgery for colon cancer last year and well recovered. He traveled to Romania, Uzbekistan, Germany and Japan. In May of this year, he refused anymore treatment and went to his annual tour to Europe. He was working in Dresden as usual, but on July 26 he became unable to move. Masako brought him back to California on August 10. Just after a month, on September 10, he departed his life. She buried his remains at the same place as his parents on October 15."

Kazumi was one of my best friends since my student days at Kyoto University. He became a professor at Tohoku University at the record age of 32 in 1968. In 1974 he went to United States to become a professor at the University of Southern California (USC) College.

The USC College News carries an obituary of Kazumi [1]. It begins by these words: "Kazumi Maki, world-renowned physicist in the field of superconductivity, has died. He was 72. Maki was among an elite group of Japanese physicists who during the 20th century fostered the development of physics as a science. He had been a USC College professor of physics and astronomy for 34 years."

Pamela Johnson, the author of the obituary, cites the words of Kazumi's colleagues about the speed of his thought, the ability of quick calculation, speaking several languages, devotion to classical music, playing violin, and singing an opera usually in German, sometimes while skipping. Yes! I knew all these features of him since our student days. One thing I did not know is this: "After earning his Ph.D. in physics at Kyoto University, Maki arrived in the United States in the 1960s and worked as a research associate with the famous physicist Yoichiro Nambu at the University of Chicago." This was his career before coming to Tohoku University.

Johnson also writes, "Among his many honors were a Fulbright Travel Grant; a Nishina Memorial Prize, given to those who have achieved exceptional results in physics; a Guggenheim fellowship; and an American Physical Society fellowship. Over the years, he also earned a USC Associates Award for Creativity in Research and Scholarship, and an additional major international prize in physics, the John Bardeen Prize, given for theoretical work that provides significant insights on the nature of superconductivity leading to verifiable predictions."

Before entering Kyoto University, Kazumi finished technology course of a senior high school in Kyoto by majoring in electrical engineering. This is a rather unusual route to enter a university, but reminds us of the great physicist P. A. M. Dirac's personal history. Dirac graduated in electrical engineering at Bristol University before reading mathematics at Cambridge University [2]. Kazumi's later success in research might have partly come from this similarity to Dirac.

At Kyoto University, Kazumi and I were in the same year class until the middle of the third year. He used to take the seat at the center of the first row in every lesson class. I often asked him to teach me about some points I had not understood in our lessons of foreign languages, mathematics, physics and so on; and he never failed to give me clear answers or useful suggestions.

Kazumi speedily read much Western classic literature either in Japanese translation or in the original even using breaks between lectures. He displayed his quick thinking not only in exams but also in chats with classmates by inserting witty comments. He eagerly attended the course on French literature given by Professor Ryoichi Ikushima, actively joined the chorus club of the university, and had a wish to belong to the orchestra club, too. (The source of most of this paragraph is [3].)

Kazumi and I exchanged letters while I spent spring and summer vacations in my home town (Kazumi lived in Kyoto with his parents). In the autumn of our fourth year at the university, he got a disease (meningitis), and could not attend lectures for a few months, so that he graduated from the university one year later than I.

In his graduate course, Kazumi studied theoretical nuclear and particle physics under Professors Minoru Kobayashi and Hideki Yukawa. Then he changed his research field to low temperature physics according to the advice of Dr. Toshihiko Tsuneto, who also had studied under Yukawa and been to United States. Thus, Kazumi had quite a broad background of research not restricted within superconductivity.

When I was a young researcher at the Radiation Center of Osaka Prefecture, I was a subscriber to the journal Nuclear Science Abstracts. Besides searching papers in the field of my interest in this journal, I often looked for Kazumi's name on the author-index pages, and constantly found his new paper on "dirty superconductors" or something like that. His productive life was good stimulus to me.

Kazumi's name first became famous by "Maki term," which reflected the increase in the normal-electron conductivity induced by super conducting fluctuations [4, 5]. Once browsing the index of the book written by Michael Tinkham [5] at a bookshop, I was surprised to find that his name was cited on pages as many as those that cited the Nobel-Prize winning physicist Lev Landau. I was also glad to find his name just appearing in David Mermin's funny essay [6].

In August 1995, Professor Naoki Toyota, an ex-student of Kazumi's at Tohoku University, invited the latter to deliver a lecture on superconductivity at Osaka Prefecture University (OPU), where I was working. After the lecture, Naoki, a few other members of OPU and I enjoyed talking with Kazumi over beer and sushi dishes. This became my final occasion of seeing him.

On his Christmas card to me, Kazumi always wrote about his academic travel of the year to many countries, often with a fancy multi-color pencil. I wish his peaceful rest in heaven.

P. J. Johnson, In Memoriam: Kazumi Maki, 72: The award-winning physicist in USC College was a classical music aficionado who played the violin, USC College News (September, 2008).

J. Daintith et al. ed., Biographical Encyclopedia of Scientists, 2nd ed., Vol. 1, p. 228 (IOP Publishing, Bristol, 1994).

M. Yata, private communication (2008).

K. Maki, Prog. Theoret. Phys. (Kyoto) Vol. 39, p. 897; Vol. 40, p. 193 (1968).

M. Tinkham, Introduction to Superconductivity (Krieger, 1975); 2nd Edition (Dover, 2004; originally published in 1996).

N. D. Mermin, E pluribus boojum: the physicist as neologist, p. 6 in "Boojums All the Way Through" (Cambridge University Press, 1990). The essay was first published in Physics Today, No. 4, p. 46 (1981).

(Final revision, January 12, 2009)

Notes Added later

I have reminded myself of the fact that at our meeting in 1995 Kazumi told me that he worked under Nambu after finishing graduate courses. This reminding was aided by the memory of my refraining from saying to him at that time, "Then you had no language problems in discussing with the Japanese-born professor." Kazumi was not a person to have any difficulty in speaking in English.

Kazumi was awarded Nishina Memorial Prize in 1972 for his theoretical work on superconductors. His winning of John Bardeen Prize 2006 was for his work on gapless quasiparticle excitations due to pair-breaking and for elucidating the role of fluctuations.

The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics

2008-10-08T21:40:00.009+09:00

A piece of good news has come from Sweden together with the smell of flowers of the fragrant olive in my garden:

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2008 with one half to Yoichiro Nambu, Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, IL, USA, “for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics” and the other half jointly to Makoto Kobayashi, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Tsukuba, Japan, and Toshihide Maskawa, Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University, Japan “for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.” (October 7, 2008)

Nambu’s work and that of Kobayashi and Maskawa have long been known to the physics community to be of the Nobel-Prize quality. So their winning of the prize at the same time is really pleasing. At the press conference of last evening, Maskawa said, “I was delighted when the work by Kobayashi and me was experimentally confirmed, but am not glad that I’ve got the prize.” As a humble scientist, I can well understand his feeling.

I wonder one thing about Maskawa. His last name spelled in orthodox romaji (a method of writing Japanese in Roman characters) is Masukawa, but he uses the spelling of Maskawa by leaving out “u” after “s” in his papers. I have had the assumption that he considered the convenience of pronunciation by English speaking people. However, the media reported that he was not good at English. Then he would not have such a consideration as I assumed. Is it that he unintentionally dropped “u” in his first publication, and has continued the same thereafter?

Related sites

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2008, Press Release, Nobelprize.org (October 7, 2008).

Scientific Background on the Nobel Prize in Physics 2008: Broken Symmetries, compiled by the Class for Physics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (October 7, 2008).

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2008, Information for the Public, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2008).

Understanding Asymmetrical Universe Garners Nobel Physics Prize for Three Scientists, Inside Science, American Institute of Physics (October 7, 2008).

Nambu, Kobayashi and Maskawa Win Physics Nobel, Scientific American (October 7, 2008).

Three Physicists Share Nobel Prize, New York Times (October 7, 2008).

Particle physicists pick up Nobel Prize, physicsworld.com (October 7, 2008).

Nobel Prize in Physics for symmetry breakdown, Nature News (October 7, 2008).

Kobayashi-Maskawa paper in PDF (1973).

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2008: Speed Read − The Importance of Asymmetry, Nobelprize.org (October 8, 2008).

Profile: Yoichiro Nambu in 1995, Scientific American, Scientific American (October 7, 2008).

A History of Nobel Physicists from Wartime Japan, Scientific American (October 7, 2008).

Scientists’ Wars

2008-09-28T10:06:00.011+09:00

They planned to publish a set of invited papers in the journal Cognitive Studies at the Japanese Cognitive Society [1]. The theme of the plan was the mirror puzzle, “Why left and right are reversed in a mirror?” Three authors including me were invited to debate. We wrote papers for three stages: (1) one’s own solution to the puzzle, (2) critiques of the other authors’ solutions, and (3) replies to the other authors’ qritiques.

Soon after the publication of our papers, I received an e-mail message to thank my cooperation from one of the authors who had been among the planners of the debates. I sent him a reply including the following passage: “I believe that scientists are not enemies against each other, but friends to cooperate to search for truth and to get as much intellectual property common to mankind as possible. So I wrote my papers of the second stage with this belief. However, it was deplorable that the other authors’ critiques were only too aggressive.”

The latest issue of Scientific American carries an excerpt [2] from Leonard Susskind’s book [3], where I found the following passage: “[The Black Hole War] was not a war between angry enemies; indeed the main participants are all friends. But it was a fierce intellectual struggle of ideas between people who deeply respected each other but also profoundly disagreed.”

Our situation was similar to the Black Hole War. In our debates, however, I did not find any tone of respect and friendliness in the other authors’ critiques. I say this because they criticized my solution on the basis of complete misunderstanding [4]. Misunderstanding should only come from careless reading of a paper, which in turn happens when one does not pay respect to the paper. You should respect your opponent’s opinion until it is defeated, because the opinion which will lose might be your own. If you kick a strong pole, the thing that is damaged is your foot.

A critique in scientists’ war can be scientific and meaningful only when it is based on an accurate understanding of the target of the criticism. Thus my opponents’ critiques were not scientific at all, and I do not think that our debates were fruitful.

Highlights: Debates on Mirror Reversal: Why Left and Right are Reversed in a Mirror?, Cognitive Studies, Vol. 15, pp. 496−558 (2008) (in Japanese).

Scientific American, Vol. 299, No. 4, p. 82 (2008).

L. Susskind, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics (Little, Brown, 2008).

My solution was already published in two parts in refereed journals, so that it does not have any point difficult to understand. Namely, before publication my coauthors and I discussed on some points with referees and editors of the journals, and finally we made them understand our arguments thoroughly to accept our manuscripts. Our publications appeared in: T. Tabata and S. Okuda, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review Vol. 7, pp. 170−173 (2000); H. Yoshimura and T. Tabata, Perception Vol. 36, pp. 1049−1056 (2007).

World Records for Men's 100 m Defy Simple Curve Fitting (2)

2008-09-14T19:48:00.020+09:00

World record progression for men's 100 m. Data, from Re. 4; dashed curve, least-squares fit of exponential function to data up to 2005; solid curve, least-squares fit of exponential function to data up to 2008. (You can see the real size image by clicking on the image).

The figure and some words in my previous blog article [1] were cited by articles of Wired Science [2] and other Web sites ([3], for example). Considering much interest shown to the topic, I post here a sequel to the previous article.

The data and the solid curve in the figure given above are the same as those in the previous article. As for another curve, description is made in the following paragraph. Following the example of the graph on a Wikipedia page [4], I have attached error bars to the earlier data recorded by hand timing (1912–1976). The later data were taken by electronic timing, and errors are considered to be within the size of the circle used for plotting. The curves fitted to the data pass through data points within the error bars for hand-timing days. (These were good old days!) Grids have also been drawn in the revised plot for the ease of reading off of values.

Alexis Madrigal writes in his article [2], "Though no statistician we spoke with had recalculated their numbers, the new world record is likely to rejigger the equations they use to calculate the maximum human speed." In relation to these words, the following is to be noted: The curve in my previous figure is a "recalculated one" in the sense that all the data including the one established by Usain Bolt at the Beijing Olympic Games are taken into account in the least-squares fit. To make this clearer, I have plotted another curve (shown by dashed line) obtained by a least-sqaures fit to the data up to 2005. This curve shows an asymptotic value of (9.66 ± 0.07) seconds.

The model of exponential decrease neglects the trends of small jigging of data, causing only changes in three coefficients in the equation (see Appendix 1). These coefficients are related to the height at the start of the curve, the rapidity of decrease and the asymptotic height of the curve. As was described in the previous article, the new asymptotic value of the world record was (9.43 ± 0.17) seconds.

In the previous article I compared this value with the value of 9.48 seconds given by Kevin Duffy in 2002 [5]. However, an examination of this value has shown that his curve is not the best fit to the data; using a logistic function and the data listed by him, I have obtained a better fit to the data with an asymptotic value of (9.67 ± 0.26) seconds, which is in good agreement to the value of 9.66 seconds obtained with data up to 2005.

Therefore, Duffy's curve fit should be regarded as the result of insufficient search with a fortuitously low asymptotic value, and the comparison with the new asymptotic value of 9.43 seconds should be made with 9.67 or 9.66 seconds. Though all these values agree with each other within the errors of the least-squares fit (see the error bars attached to the right ends of the curves), the decrease of the central value by 0.24 or 0.23 seconds obtained in the fit to the data up to 2008 reflects the big effect produced by Usain Bolt's two latest records. The larger error in the asymptotic value of the fit to the data up to 2008 indicates that the rapid decrease of the record time brought about by Bolt defies simple curve fitting.

I wrote in the previous article, "During many years, unexpected factors might come to affect the making of records, so that the result of curve fitting should not be much relied upon." The scientists whom Madrigal spoke with also said things similar to this. Namely, Peter Weyand, a physiologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas who focuses on the biomechanics of running, said that mathematical models could never predict how fast humans might eventually run. The biomechanicist John Hutchinson of the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London, who studies how animals move, agreed with Weyand that the human speed limit would remain impossible to predict with any confidence, and mentioned as limiting factors the amount of advanced biotechnologies the International Olympic Committee and other regulatory authorities would allow sprinters to use.

In the previous article I criticized Duffy's use of a logistic function, but I do not deny the use of one when the earliest data with the trend of slow decrease are available. I expect that such data will soon be posted on the Wikipedia page [4], because it now includes the title of a section, "Unofficial progression before the IAAF" (IAAF was the International Amateur Athletics Federation, and now is known as the International Association of Athletics Federations).

"World records for men's 100 m defy simple curve fitting," IDEA & ISAAC: Femto-Essays (18 August 2008); also in Ted's Coffeehouse (19 August 2008).

A. Madrigal, "Bolt is freaky fast, but nowhere near human limits," Wired Science (25 August 2008).

Fabulation, "Usain Bolt : rapide, mais pas surhumain," Geek… mais pas trop (27 August 2008).

"World record progression 100 metres men," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (6 September 2008, at 05:52).

Kevin Duffy, 100 m sprinting: Is there a limit? (21 September 2002; last revision, 15 January 2008).

Read a similar analysis made on August 18, 2009, by taking Bolt's record of 9.58 seconds into account.

Appendix 1

The equation I used for curve fitting is as follows:

　　　y = a + b exp(–cx),

where I used transformations

　　　x = (X – 1900)/100,
　　　y = Y – 9.5 (seconds),

X denotes the year, and Y, the world record in seconds. These transformations make the estimation of the starting value of the coefficients a, b and c for least-squares fit easy. A simple guess of the the starting values of a=0, b=1 and c=1 is good enough. The final values of coefficients obtained for the data up to 2008 are as follows:

　　　a = –0.07 ± 0.17 (seconds),
　　　b = 1.30 ± 0.13 (seconds),
　　　c = 1.27 ± 0.36.

The asymptotic value of the world record is given by (9.5 + a) seconds.

Appendix 2

The author of the blog article [3] wrote me, "Some friends of mine asked me why you had chose an exponential model, and not a polynomial one or another mathematical function. I answered that in physics it is very usual to see things behave in an exponential way. However, it is true that sportsmen are neither radioactive nuclei nor physical objets that are inclined to have an exponential behavior. What do you think I could answer to this particular question?" In this appendix I write my answer to this question.

Sure, sportsmen are neither radioactive nuclei nor any physical object. However, the record produced by them shows the following trends: In earlier years of taking records, they can improve the record rather easily by efforts and exercise to get over the past records, the time of record exhibiting a rapid decrease. Then the stage of slow decrease comes because of limitation by mankind's bio-mechanical structure, showing the trend of approach to a limit. The simplest function to express these global trends is an exponential function with a constant term. A polynomial, for example, does not guarantee the reproduction of the trend of approach to a limit, though it can express minor jigging in data.

Ranking Countries in Order of Athletic Level

2008-08-27T20:02:00.009+09:00

I never attach importance to the number of gold medals won by different countries in Olympic Games, nor want to find fault with that attained by China in Beijing Olympic Games held this summer. I would just like to point out that the ranks of countries are quite different when the number per population is considered instead of the actual number.

The ranks of countries by the number of gold medals (more than five) in Beijing Olympic Games are as follows (Ref. 1):

1	China	51
2	United States	36
3	Russian Fed.	23
4	Great Britain	19
5	Germany	16
6	Australia	14
7	Korea	13
8	Japan	9
9	Italy	8
10	France	7
10	Ukraine	7
10	Netherlands	7
13	Jamaica	6

On the other hand, the ranks by the number of gold medals per population among the above thirteen countries are as shown below. The first number for each country is the population taken from Ref. 2 in units of one hundred million; and the second number is the number of medals per population multiplied by one hundred million.

1	Jamaica	0.0271	221
2	Australia	0.214	65
3	Netherlands	0.164	43
4	Great Britain	0.610	31
5	Korea	0.482	27
6	Germany	0.822	19
7	Russian Fed.	1.42	16
8	Ukraine	0.461	15
9	Italy	0.596	13
10	United States	3.05	12
11	France	0.645	11
12	Japan	1.28	7
13	China	13.3	4

If we include the countries and regions that won at least one gold medal, the ranks would be different much more. Anyway, the second method of ranking clearly shows that a good fight exhibited by Jamaican athletes including the sprinter Usain Bolt was wonderful in Beijing Olympic Games.

Let us consider two countries A and B, A having much larger population than B, and assume that these countries have the same athletic level. Then, country A is statistically expected to produce a larger number of excellent athletes. This makes the method of ranking by the number of medals favorable to A. In country A, however, the selection of the delegation for Olympic Games would be severer because of the limited number of medals expected, making the method of ranking by the number of medals per population unfavorable to A. Therefore, the method that combines these two methods with certain weights might be adequate to know the proper rankings of countries in order of athletic level.

Overall Medal Standings, The Official Website of Beijing Olympic Games August 8-24, 2008.

List of countries by population, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (26 August 2008, at 07:09).

World Records for Men's 100 m Defy Simple Curve Fitting

2008-08-20T09:33:00.012+09:00

World record progression for men's 100 m. Data, from Re. 1; curve, least-squares fit of exponential function to data. (You can see the real size image by clicking on the image).

Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt won the gold medal for the 100-meter race of the 2008 Olympic Games on Saturday, August 16, establishing the new world record of 9.69 seconds. We find world records for this race since 1912 at the Wikipedia site [1]. A few data points of the latest world records show rapid decrease (see the figure above). This trend seems to defy simple curve fitting.

However, I dared to try fitting of an exponential function, y = a + b exp(−cx), to the data. The asymptotic value a, i.e., the limit of the world record, has been found to be 9.43 seconds with a probable error of 0.17 seconds, namely, to lie between 9.26 to 9.60 seconds. During many years, unexpected factors might come to affect the making of records, so that the result of curve fitting should not be much relied upon.

Duffy [2] also considered the limit to 100-m sprinting. He fitted a logistic function to the data up to 2002, and estimated a limit of 9.48. This value is rather in good agreement with the present result. (Among the legends in his Figure 2, "exponential fit" should read "straight-line fit".)

A logistic function is useful to model the S-curve of growth [3]. The initial stage of growth is approximately exponential; then, as saturation begins, the growth slows, and at maturity, growth stops. To use this function for the decay phenomenon that reaches a limit, it is necessary to make the function upside-down by making the coefficient in the exponential function negative. Further, one more coefficient should be added to give a finite limit. The function thus obtained has the properties of a slow initial decrease and a final decrease of approximately exponential type. To model a data set without a slow initial decrease, the exponential function of the form I used suffices.

"World record progression 100 metres men," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (18 August 2008, at 12:42).

Kevin Duffy, 100 m sprinting: Is there a limit? (September 21, 2002; last revision, January 15, 2008).

"Logistic function," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (11 August 2008, at 12:38).

Read part 2 of this article.
Read a similar analysis made on August 18, 2009, by taking Bolt's record of 9.58 seconds into account.

Backscattering of Antiprotons

2008-08-15T15:40:00.012+09:00

The figure shows the energy and number backscattering coefficients of hydrogen ions incident on thick layer of aluminum as a function of incident kinetic energy [1], and can be used to estimate the backscattering coefficients of antiprotons. (You can see the real size image by clicking on the image).

In the previous essay I wrote about the backscattering (also called reflection) of antiprotons from aluminum wall found by Italian physicists. The ratio of the number of backscattered particles to the number of particles incident on a layer of material is called number backscattering coefficient R_N.

R_N of antiprotons are almost the same as that of protons, because the basic formula of the phenomena related to the passage of particles through matter, i.e., the energy loss per unit pass length and the Rutherford scattering cross section, are independent of the sign of the incident particles. Therefore, R_N of antiprotons can be estimated by the use of a universal empirical equation we published for R_N of light ions, which include the hydrogen ion, i.e., the proton, incident on different absorber materials [1].

The equation for the hydrogen ion incident on the thick aluminum layer is given by the upper curve in the above figure. The energies of the antiprotons referred to by the Italian physicists are from 1 to 10 keV. For these energies, R_N of the hydrogen ion and accordingly that of the antiproton can be seen to decrease from about 13%, a considerable fraction, at 1 keV to 2.5% at 10 keV.

R. Ito, T. Tabata, N. Itoh, K. Morita, T. Kato and H. Tawara, Data on the backscattering coefficients of light ions from solids (A revision), Institute of Plasma Physics Nagoya University Report IPPJ-AM-41 (1985).

No Surprise to a Radiation Physicist

2008-08-13T16:24:00.005+09:00

The e-mail note for "Physical Review Focus 11 August 2008" carried the news story entitled "Antimatter Bounces off Matter" (online Focus story is given in [1]). The story tells that in the August Physical Review A, a team of Italian researchers reports that a good fraction of a low energy antimatter beam directed at a normal matter wall will bounce right back.

Fans of science fiction know that the meeting of matter and antimatter results in the annihilation of both, accompanied by a release of a tremendous amount of energy. Therefore, the above result, based on a new analysis of 12-year-old data, is reported to be "surprising even to most physicists, though it is explained by basic textbook principles."

I have read the full story [1] and the abstract of the paper [2] written by the Italian physicists. The antimatter in their experiment was a beam of low energy antiprotons, and they observed a large fraction of the beam was reflected by an aluminum wall at the end of the apparatus. They made a Monte Carlo simulation of the antiproton path in aluminum, and found that the observed reflection occurred primarily via a multiple Rutherford scattering on Al nuclei.

The phenomenon is the backscattering of antiprotons from a thick layer of matter. Radiation physicists well know the same phenomenon for the beams of electrons, protons, ions and positrons (note that positrons are the antiparticles of electrons). I'm one of those physicists, and especially studied the backscattering of electrons and ions. Thus the story came as no surprise to me.

The abstract concludes with the sentence, "These results contradict the common belief according to which the interactions between matter and antimatter are dominated by the reciprocally destructive phenomenon of annihilation." I would like to say, "It is rather surprising that such a common belief has been held not only by fans of science fiction but also by high-energy physicists."

Antiprotons having some energy and passing far from nuclei behave like ordinary particles with a unit negative charge, and suffer the same amount of Rutherford scattering as that protons do; they annihilate with protons only when they come quite close to nuclei. This should be a common belief about antiproton beams instead of the one described by the Italian team.

Antimatter Bounces Off Matter, Physical Review Focus, 11 August 2008.

A. Bianconi, et al., Experimental evidence of antiproton reflection by a solid surface, Phys. Rev. A Vol. 78 (issue of August 2008).

Got a Good Message

2008-07-02T22:01:00.001+09:00

Yesterday I got an e-mail message from the provider of my second Web site to notify the arrival of a comment at the guestbook page. Recently I got only spam comments there. So I opened the provider's page for deleting the guest comment newly arrived. However, I found a good message there. It was from the late Dr. Lewis Spencer's youngest daughter. She found my mention [1] of her father's passing by Google search, and expressed thanks to me. This was one of the pleasant things of my life these days.

As I wrote on the Web page [1], I saw Dr. Spencer only twice; once in Kyoto, and once at the former National Beureau of Standards, USA. On both of these occasions, however, he was very kind to me. So I'll never forget his hospitality. I also learned much from his excellent publications on the penetration of fast electrons through matter for doing my research work. When I saw him for the first time, I was surprised to find the person who did wonderful calculations did not have one of the arms (possibly it was the right one). I do not know how he lost his arm.

Lewis V. Spencer, IDEA & ISAAC Web site (2005).

"He Wants to Dazzle Voters"

2005-09-02T08:09:00.012+09:00

Recently the British newspaper The Financial Times published an editorial comment [1] on the election to be held in Japan on September 11. It keenly criticizes the leader of a party for wanting to dazzle voters, by describing the following facts:

He has kept voters' attention relentlessly focused on himself and his attempts to reform the party and Japan Post. Foreign policy is glaringly absent from the campaign, although Japan faces several pressing international challenges. They include rising oil prices, the unnervingly bad relationship with China, and the negotiations over US military bases with Washington.

This is a correct view. We, Japanese voters, should not be deceived by such a style of campaign.

Reference

"Japan's small world," Financial Times (August 29, 2005).

Former Army Nurse's Story

2005-08-24T08:34:00.003+09:00

In the afternoon of August 21, a meeting was held to prepare for the establishment of the Association of Sakai to Keep and Make the Best Use of Article 9 (a tentative name) at Sun-Square Sakai. I attended the meeting together with more than a dozen of people. We exchanged our thought about Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan and opinions for our activity.

Among the participants, there was Ms. M, who had been an army nurse and worked in Nanjing and China during the final years of the World War II. She talked about her work of cultivating bacteria at Nanjing Hospital as well as other unpleasant experiences. She did that work believing it to be for some basic research, but she was requested to grow more and more bacteria. She thought it necessary for improving her skill, and worked hard on it. However, she was ordered to do the job more and more. Afterward, she came to believe that those bacteria had been for germ weapons, and reflects what a lousy job she was made to work on.

On a holiday, Ms. M and her friend nurses saw a long line of soldiers. Thinking it to be for getting some supply, they joined the line. A soldier said to them, "Go away, or you would be laughed at." They said, "Isn't this a queue for supply?" The soldier said, "It's supply of a pea." Actually the line was for "military prostitutes."

After Japan's defeat, Japanese soldiers turned into a beast, and nurses feared them. Some nurses committed suicide thinking it better than to be a captive. In January 1946, Ms. M was carried from Nanjing to Shanghai by a freight train together with other nurses and soldiers to come back to Japan. All of them were standing in tightly filled freight cars. A soldier next to her leaned to her. She pushed him back saying, "Don't push me. I feel heavy." However, carefully looking at him, she found that the soldier was dead. She soon got a high fever. It was due to malaria. However, she could endure the fever by touching the cold corpse. — The dead body saved her. —

These are only a few examples among a lot of unhappy situations experienced by many persons in the war. Do you think it appropriate that we allow Japan again to go to war under the pretext of cooperative, self defense?

Comparison between Feynman and Einstein by Peter Galison

2005-08-20T08:34:00.011+09:00

A collection of the letter's of the Nobel-prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, edited by his daughter, Michelle Feynman, was recently published [1]. Reviewing this book, Peter Galison of the Department of Physics, Harvard University, compares Feynman and Albert Einstein [2].

Galison starts his review by the sentence, "Richard Feynman was a physicist's physicist," and writes about Feynman's contributions in fundamental physics and beyond as well as his public intervention in the analysis of the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster. Then, he refers to Feynman's fame within and outside the physics community, adding, "Young physicists regularly tack a poster of Feynman above their desks. If there are posters of other Nobel prizewinners on sale, I haven't seen them. [My note: Here is a line break] Except, of course, for Albert Einstein." — Yes, I saw a photo of Feynman even on the desk of a young physicist at Kharkov University in Ukraine, where another famous physicist Lev Landau had worked. —

In a next paragraph, Galison describes about Einstein's iconic status extending far beyond the physics world, and states, "And yet, since the early 1960s, generations of science students held Feynman, not Einstein, as their model and guiding star." — Similarly to other physics students and physicists in earlier days, I had held Einstein as a model and guiding star until I read Feynman's book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" [3] in 1985. I was a latecomer to the community of Feynman fans, though I read the three volumes of The Feynman Lectures on Physics [4] earlier than that and liked the volumes very much. —

Galison compares Feynman and Einstein, writing as follows (numbers are attached by me): (1) Einstein never lost his fascination for philosophy; Feynman found philosophers nothing but a burden. (2) Einstein came to believe that physical reality lay deep in mathematical physics; Feynman never gave up hoping for a physics driven, at bottom, by an almost tactile intuition. (3) Much of Einstein's life found him cast and self-cast as an oracle; Feynman preferred the persona of a fast-draw street-smart kid.

Galison concludes: "Yet beyond these striking differences, both Einstein and Feynman found ways to hold their own ..." — Namely, they were different and similar at the same time. —

Around the middle of his review, Galison quotes Feynman's last letter to his first wife, Arline, written after she died of tuberculosis in June 1945. The letter ends with the words, "P. S. Please excuse me my not mailing this — but I don't know your new address." This letter plainly and movingly conveys Feynman's sadness brought by Arline's death.

References

M. Feynman, ed. with an introduction, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman (Basic Books, 2005).
P. Galison, "Letters from a hero: What made Richard Feynman so much more than a Nobel prizewinning physicist?" Nature, Vol. 436, p. 320 (2005).
R. P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character, as told to R. Leighton, ed. by E. Hutchings (W. W. Norton, paperbound 1997; hardbound 1985).
R. P. Feynman, R. B. Leighton and M. Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics (Addison Wesley, 1963).

An International Newspaper's Warning to Japan

2005-08-19T16:02:00.003+09:00

In an article published in the August-15 issue of The International Herald Tribune, Martin Fackler points out that in recent years public opinion in Japan seems to be creeping toward the right, and warns that the diverging views of the World War II in Japan and the rest of Asia threaten to isolate Japan from its neighbors [1].

Fackler writes that in Japan there is a growing movement to find reasons to be proud of the World War II. He sees this movement in the following facts: Many movies, novels and comics have appeared praising the bravery of Japanese soldiers and sailors; some junior high schools now use textbooks that brush over Japanese atrocities; the newly opened Yamato Museum in Kure gives exhibits to describe how Japan built a modern navy to fend off greedy Western powers. Thus he insists that such positive views of the war are worsening an already yawning perception gap with the rest of eastern Asia, where wartime Japan is still commonly seen as a cruel invader.

As for Japan's failure to reach a national consensus on its responsibility for the war, Fackler writes that the Allied-run 1946-48 Tokyo war crimes trials is viewed here skeptically as a case of victors' vengeance. He also criticizes Japanese leaders for having failed to take a leading role in creating a national sense of remorse, as German leaders did to help guide their country's public opinion.

Fackler conclusively cites the following view of experts: Japan's real failure is not an inability to apologize to China and other Asian countries but that it is its refusal to include outside voices, particularly those of its former victims, as it discusses its own role in the war. Taking the victims' perspectives seriously is the only way Japan can convince the rest of Asia to trust it again.

Not only Japanese politicians but also all the Japanese should listen to these objective words given in the international newspaper.

Reference

M. Fackler, 60 years after its defeat, Japan still struggles with responsibility. International Herald Tribune (August 15, 2005); this article can now be read on a Web page of New York Times.

New Books on Atomic Bombs

2005-08-02T08:49:00.004+09:00

I am a subscriber to "The Good Book Guide (GBG)" [1] published in England. This month we have the 60th anniversary of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So, the August issue of the GBG lists some books on atomic bombs published or republished recently.

In the "History" section of the GBG, the book "Shock Wave: The Countdown to Hiroshima" [2] written by Stephen Walker is introduced with these words: "The author is an award-winning film maker, and that pictorial essence is evident throughout the narrative. A stunning chronicle of one of the 20th-century's defining moments."

In the same column John Hersey's "Hiroshima" is also mentioned. This book was first published in 1985, and now a paperback edition is available [3]. Hersey interviewed six Hiroshima survivors in 1946, and forty years later he returned to discover how the same six people have coped with the catastrophe and with crippling disease.

In the "Discovery" section of the GBG, the book "Before the Fall-out: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima" [4] written by Diana Preston is an editor's choice. This book is introduced to be the illuminating one that describes how fascinating personalities from Marie Curie to Robert Oppenheimer thought and how they interacted with the world around them.

The column for Preston's book includes another book, "The Bomb: A Life" [5] written by Gerard DeGroot. In this book, the author traces the history of atomic warfare back to June 1917 when Germany bombed a London school, killing 18 children, and reveals the personalities of those caught up in a horrific arms race. After the first half of the previous sentence, the introduction in the GBG writes, "Just over 28 years later the US dropped the world's first atomic bomb on a Nagasaki hospital, destroying the city and killing more than 150,000 people." This is wrong; the first atomic bomb was dropped, not on Nagasaki, but on Hiroshima.

I wish that these books make more and more people the world over think seriously about the comprehensive ban of nuclear weapons.

References

The Good Book Guide.
Stephen Walker, Shock Wave: The Countdown to Hiroshima (John Murray, 2005).
John Hersey, Hiroshima (Ishi Press, 2009; Penguin, 2002; first published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1985).
Diana Preston, Before the Fall-out: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima (Doubleday, 2005; paperback edition published by Corgi, 2006).
Gerard DeGroot, The Bomb: A Life (Pimlico, 2005; paperback edition published by Harvard University Press, 2006).

The "Field" in Physics

2005-07-25T15:10:00.003+09:00

A blog friend of mine, Y, wrote in her recent blog post as follows:

When I have contact with a person to study the problems of either the scene and activity of social welfare or various social phenomena, I, as one of the persons being present at the site, feel many things from that person's talk and behavior, and scientifically consider about the movement that makes the "field."

This sentence has made me think that the study of social problems is similar to that of elementary particles, because both the studies concern interactions and the "field." From this thought I now want to write a simple introduction to the concept of the "field" important in physics.

In everyday life we experience magnetic, electric and gravitational forces; these are respectively caused by the magnetic, electric and gravitational field. You may know that the magnetic field can be visualized by sprinkling iron filings near a bar magnet. The electric and magnetic fields were theoretically found to be unified as the electromagnetic field by James Clerk Maxwell in the 19th century. The things that mediate the fields are elementary particles. The electromagnetic field is mediated by the photon; and the gravitational field, by the graviton. (Gravitons have yet to be discovered experimentally.)

Each kind of elementary particle has a definite mass, including the special cases of zero mass for the photon and the gluon (the gluon is the particle that mediates the "strong nuclear field"; the force of this field binds quarks to make protons and neutrons). Theoretical physicists now consider that the masses arise from the interaction of particles with a kind of field termed "Higgs field" and that the origin of Higgs field is a supposed particle called "Higgs boson." (This consideration is based on the Standard Model and Supersymmetric Standard Models of elementary particle physics.) — Now you may remember the question, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" —

One of the main aims of the present high-energy experimental physics is to find Higgs bosons to confirm the above consideration. For this purpose, they use gigantic machines such as Tevatron Collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in USA. and Large Hadron Collider under construction at CERN, European laboratory for particle physics near Geneva. It is one of grand plans to move the frontiers of human knowledge forward. (You can read more about the mass and the Higgs field in a recent issue of Scientific American [1].)

Reference

G. Kane, "The Mysteries of mass," Scientific American, Vol. 293, No. 1, p. 31 (2005).

Difficulty of Persuasion

2005-07-19T19:59:00.001+09:00

Last month I read an article in the New York Times written by a columnist, Matt Miller [1]. He writes, "Is persuasion dead? ... The significance of this query goes beyond the feelings of futility I'll suffer if it turns out I've wasted my life on work that is useless."

I think of the same question when I write essays about political problems at my blog site. I seldom get a comment like this: "You have opened my eye." (I got one such from a woman. Later, I heard that she had committed suicide. Amen.) If the probability of arguing other persons into my own belief were quite low, writing my opinions in my blogs would be the waste of my time and labor.

Miller finds the death of persuasion by noting the followings: "Best-selling books reinforce what folks thought when they bought them. Talk radio and opinion journals preach to the converted." The situation seems to be the same in Japan. This trend might have not only a bad side but also a good one; people have strong belief in their own thought. However, it should be questioned if they established their thought after careful comparison of different opinions. I am afraid that the flooding of information in these days might be making such comparison rather difficult.

Miller's article is not completely pessimistic. He writes that reading Ken Pollack's book, "The Threatening Storm" [2], he was persuaded, and concludes by the words, "Like Sisyphus, those who seek a better public life have to keep rolling the rock uphill." Miller, however, does not persuade me in that Pollack's book is persuasive because I learned from the reviews of the book at Amazon Web site that Pollack favored invasion of Iraq by U.S.A. I do not think that war is good for any reason.

However low the probability of success in persuasion might be, we should continue to express our sincere opinion by expecting that the storm of good will should change the world in a better direction slowly but steadily.

References

M. Miller, "Is Persuasion Dead?" New York Times (June 4, 2005).

K. Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (Random House, 2002).

Science of Happiness

2005-07-14T20:05:00.002+09:00

D. Nettle's book "Happiness" [4].
From the title of this blog you might think that this is a story about a new religion, but it is not. I have learned the followings from Dylan Evans's book review in the latest issue of Nature [1]: Many of the founding fathers of psychology, such as William James (1842-1910) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), regarded happiness as their central concern. However, it seemed that psychologists forgot this theme for much of the twentieth century. We have long waited for a book about the scientific study of happiness, and then three [2-4] have come along at once. — Evans compares this happening to our experience in waiting for a bus. —

Reviewing the three books on happiness, Evans first writes several things they have in common. Thus we learn that any one of them is good to get knowledge about a summary of the field at the level of general public, i.e., various different meanings of happiness, the way to measure happiness, main factors of happiness (money, life events, personality, genes, etc.), the relation between happiness and health, contradictions between scientific research and commonsense intuitions about the best method of obtaining happiness, etc.

Next, Evans writes about differences among the three books. However, it would suffice for many readers to note his words in the final paragraph (it is often useful to read a book review from the last paragraph): "If I had to recommend just one of these books, it would be Nettle's, because it conveys about the same amount of information as the other two books in about half the number of words."

An individual person's feeling of happiness, i.e., subjective happiness, might be a problem in the field of psychology. In this age of frequent terrorism outrages, however, the objective happiness of every person, i.e., the happiness of the human being as a whole, is considered to be an important problem. This should be studied by cooperation of many fields including sociology, political science and anthropology.

References

D. Evans, "A happy gathering," Nature Vol. 436, p. 26 (2005).

R. Layard, "Happiness: Lessons from a New Science" (Allen Lane/Penguin, 2005).

P. Martin, "Making Happy People: The Nature of Happiness and Its Origin in Childhood" (Fourth Estate, 2005).

D. Nettle, "Happiness: The Science behind Your Smile" (Oxford University Press, 2005).

Classifying 125 Questions in Science

2005-07-11T20:19:00.001+09:00

In a previous blog [1] I cited the 25 big questions in science given in the special section of the 125th anniversary issue [2] of the Science magazine. The special section included also 100 smaller questions. I browsed them and wanted to introduce them to the readers of my blogs, but the list is so long to put in a blog post. Thus, I have tried to classify the total 125 questions into different disciplines of science to give here the number of questions in each discipline in place of my initial plan. The result is as follows (the first number for each discipline comes from big questions; and the second, from smaller ones):

Cosmology (1, 6)
Physics (2, 14)
Chemistry (1, 4)
Energy-Source Science (1, 1)
Astronomy & Earth Science (2, 6)
Biology, Medical Science & Physiology (14, 50)
Ecology (1, 4)
Anthropology (1, 5)
Sociology (1, 4)
Mathematics (1, 6)
————————————————————————
Total (25, 100)

Many of the questions are interdisciplinary, so that my classification is rather arbitrary. Especially, the boundaries among biology, medical science and physiology are not clear, though some questions definitely belong to medical science and some others to physiology. Thus I made these three disciplines a single category of classification.

However, the numbers of questions in the above three disciplines hold the unquestioned lead against any other combination of three. Therefore, we can guess that these three disciplines should be the busiest ones from present to the near future, only with the following caution: We should not accept the numbers at their face value, because the 125 questions were chosen by the editors and writers of the "Science" magazine, which is especially popular in the fields of biological science.

The introductory article [3] of the special section aptly cites James Clark Maxwell's witty words: "Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science." In other words, posing a good question is the start of good research.

References

"25 Big Questions in Science", Femto-Essays (2005).

"What don't we know?" Science Vol. 309, p. 75 (2005).

T. Siegfried, "In praise of hard questions" Science Vol. 309, p. 75 (2005).

25 Big Questions in Science

2005-07-07T20:12:00.002+09:00

Part of the cover of the 125th anniversary issue of the Science magazine.
The Science magazine published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science marked the 125th anniversary on July 1, 2005. The issue to celebrate this occasion includes the special section entitled "What don't we know?" [1]. The section lists and explains 25 big questions facing science over the next quarter-century and 100 smaller ones (the total number of questions equals the number related to the anniversary). For those who are interested in the future of science, I cite the list of the big questions here.

What Is the Universe Made Of?
What is the Biological Basis of Consciousness?
Why Do Humans Have So Few Genes?
To What Extent Are Genetic Variation and Personal Health Linked?
Can the Laws of Physics Be Unified?
How Much Can Human Life Span Be Extended?
What Controls Organ Regeneration?
How Can a Skin Cell Become a Nerve Cell?
How Does a Single Somatic Cell Become a Whole Plant?
How Does Earth's Interior Work?
Are We Alone in the Universe?
How and Where Did Life on Earth Arise?
What Determines Species Diversity?
What Genetic Changes Made Us Uniquely Human?
How Are Memories Stored and Retrieved?
How Did Cooperative Behavior Evolve?
How Will Big Pictures Emerge from a Sea of Biological Data?
How Far Can We Push Chemical Self-Assembly?
What Are the Limits of Conventional Computing?
Can We Selectively Shut Off Immune Responses?
Do Deeper Principles Underlie Quantum Uncertainty and Nonlocality?
Is an Effective HIV Vaccine Feasible?
How Hot Will the Greenhouse World Be?
What Can Replace Cheap Oil -- and When?
Will Malthus Continue to Be Wrong?

Which questions are you most interested in? I am interested in questions 1, 5 and 21 as a physicist; in 2 and 6 as a human being; and in 10, 11, 23 and 25 as a being living on the earth. I would also like to introduce to you the 100 smaller questions in subsequent blogs, if possible.

"What don't we know?" Science Vol. 309, p. 75 (2005).

Relationships between Arts and Science

2005-07-05T20:28:00.002+09:00

These days we often find the topics on the relation between arts and science in newspapers. (Here I mean arts and humanities by "arts," and natural sciences by "science.") An example is the news that the Faculty of Culture and Information Science was opened in April 2005 at Kyotanabe Campus of Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan [1].

At the Web site of the Doshisha University [2] they write the characteristics of this faculty as follows: "The educational programs are designed for students to understand the significance of cultures by analyzing them with the concept of data science. The curriculum promotes the interdisciplinary methods which connect the traditional studies in the field of humanities with information science."

This is a trend to be welcomed in education and research at universities. However, the analysis of the products of humanities by the method of science is only one of many possible aspects of interaction between arts and science. I write here a few examples of other aspects I have learned from the book-review pages of the science journal "Nature" (It is to be noted that the book review pages in this journal have been entitled "Books & Arts" since 2003, and includes introductions to exhibitions and stage arts related to science or the "Science in Culture" column.)

In the book "Madam Bovary's Ovaries" [3], David Barash and Nanelle Barash attempted to interpret fiction in terms of biology. The reviewer of the book, Michel Raymond writes [4] that the classical boundaries between biology and the social sciences are fading away and that the above authors explore various aspects of human mating strategies, rooting human behaviors within the animal repertoire and using novels instead of scholarly publications. Raymond also gives a useful suggestion that an evolutionary book could provide some welcome insights on the historical origin of the novel in various human cultures and its relationship with other kinds of literature such as myths or fairly tales.

The neuroscientist Steven Rose published the book "The 21st-Century Brain" [5]. The reviewer John Marshall of this book writes as follows [6]: Rose stresses the observation that individual life stories are shaped by culture, society and technology and is even prepared to believe that science is perhaps intrinsically incomplete and must be complemented by the kind of knowledge we gain from arts. Marshall warns that Rose's observation, however true, does little to bridge the gap between brain and mind. At this point it does not seem that Marshall looks at the future.

The above examples are related to the usefulness of arts to complement research in science. The next example shows an aspect different from these.

Paul Davies reviewed [7] the book "Warped Passages" written by Lisa Randall [8]. This is a book for general readers on hidden dimensions being studied at the frontier of theoretical physics. Davis writes, "Perhaps readers don't really intend to follow [popular-science books] studiously, but wade through the expositions as a cultural experience, rather like reflecting on a Jackson Pollock painting -- you know it's very clever and you assume it means something profound to the creator." [Pollock (1912-1956) is an American painter famous for drip painting.] Davies's words may be a little extreme, but suggest that artists and scientists can learn each other about their methods of expressions.

Asahi-Shimbun (April 8, 2005).

Web site, Doshisha University.

D. P. Barash and N. R. Barash, "Madam Bovary's Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature" (Delacorte Press, 2005).

M. Raymond, Nature Vol. 435, p. 28 (2005).

S. Rose, "The 21st-Century Brain: Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind" (Jonathan Cape, 2005); Published in the US as "The Future of the Brain" (Oxford University Press, 2005).

J. C. Marshall, Nature Vol. 435, p. 27 (2005).

P. Davies, Nature Vol. 435, p. 1161 (2005).

L. Randall, "Warped Passages: Unravelling the Universe's Hidden Dimensions" (Allen Lane, 2005); To be published in the US in September by Ecco (HarperCollins).

Time Travel

2005-06-30T20:09:00.002+09:00

The newspaper The USA Today carried the technical news about the time traveler convention to be held in the afternoon of a Saturday in May 2005 [1]. The convention was organized by Amal Dorai, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in USA. Dorai said, "The chance that anybody [from the future] shows up is small, but if it happens it will be one of the biggest events in human history."

MIT physics professor Alan Guth weighed an invitation to speak at the convention. Guth's work involves applying theoretical particle physics to the early universe, but he has dabbled in writing about time travel theories. He is reported to have said, "Most of us would bet it's impossible, but none of us can prove it's impossible either."

Recently an article as long as 3060 words to summarize physicists' views on time travel appeared in The New York Times [2]. The author of this article, Dennis Overbye, is the recipient of the 1980 American Institute of Physics writing award. He begins the article by writing, "I'm still hoping to attend [the convention], and although the odds are slim, they are apparently not zero despite the efforts and hopes of deterministically minded physicists..."

Overbye's review starts from the words of Dr. J. Richard Gott, a Princeton astrophysicist and author of the 2001 book Time Travel in Einstein's Universe: "No law of physics that we know of prohibits time travel."

Then Overbye explains the situation about time travel as follows: "It's not that physicists expect to be able to go back and ... drop by the Bern patent office to take Einstein to lunch ... In fact, they're pretty sure those are absurd dreams ... They hope such extreme theorizing could reveal new features, gaps or perhaps paradoxes or contradictions in the foundations of Physics As We Know It and point the way to new ideas."

"Student organizes time traveler conference," USA Today (May 7, 2005).

Dennis Overbye, "Remembrance of Things Future: The Mystery of Time," New York Times (June 28, 2005).

US Newspaper Articles on Yasukuni

2005-06-29T19:53:00.004+09:00

Recently The New York Times and The USA Today took up the Yasukuni problem in Japan one after another. The article in the former [1] describes the following argument of Yasukuni's war museum: "America forced Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor as a way of shaking off the Depression, and the US economy made a complete recovery once the Americans entered the war." Then the author of the article critically writes, "Yasukuni's view of history is one that few Asians or Americans would accept."

Further, the author refers to USA's noticeable silence on Yasukuni and the verdict on the Class A war criminals (in 1978 Yasukuni secretly enshrined 14 Class A war criminals convicted by an international tribunal after World War II, as is pointed out by the article of The USA Today). He guesses the reason for this silence as follows: "China's rise alarms America just as much as did the rise of Communism in the 1940's. So better a strong, remilitarized Japan, no matter what the Japanese say about Yasukuni or war criminals."

The article in The USA Today [2] similarly introduces the following descriptions at the Yasukuni Web site: "The attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the invasions of China and Southeast Asia were made to maintain the independence and peace of the nation and for the prosperity of all Asia. The 14 [A Class] war criminals are martyrs who were unjustly tried as war criminals by a sham-like tribunal of allied forces."

The author of the article in The USA Today puts a rhetorical question, "So why does Koizumi visit Yasukuni despite the furor [of China, South Korea and other Asian countries]?" The answer is given by the words of Michael Cucek of the consultancy Okamoto Associates: "Koizumi is currying favor with right-wing Japanese politicians whose support he needs to implement his policies, particularly the privatization of Japan's postal system."

I suspect rather that the right-wing thought is deeply rooted in the mind of Koizumi and many politicians of Liberal and Democratic Party. The Japanese should learn all the above facts conveyed in the articles in the newspapers of USA to make good choice in the next vote for the Diet members.

N. Onishi, "A war shrine, for a Japan seeking a not guilty verdict," New York Times (June 22, 2005).

P. Wiseman, "Tokyo shrine a focus of fury around Asia," USA Today (June 23, 2005).

The followings have been taken from the comment column of the blog site where this post originally appeared:

Michael Cucek 06/30/2005
Ted -
I would like to think that I understand the Prime Minister's thinking--but he remains a cipher, a black box. He acts not according to a fixed set of rules but more from a loose set of constantly reconfigured concepts. Ask his inner circle what his philosophy of governance is and you hear a range of contradictory opinions reflecting the prejudices of the speakers rather than the core beliefs of the man. When Paul Wiseman asked me what the PM's motives could be for continuing to go to Yasukuni, I gave an answer that ignores the PM's feelings. It was the only intellectually honest route.

Ted 06/30/2005
Hi Michael,
Thanks a lot for your kind comment. Sure, Koizumi-san is a black box. However, I cannot at least judge him to be the man who sincerely repents Japan's aggressive wars in the past.

The Man Who Loved Orchids and Peace

2005-06-28T20:27:00.003+09:00

Asahi Beer Oyamazaki Villa Museum,
Otokuni-gun, Kyoto Prefecture.
On June 16, 2005, I visited Asahi Beer Oyamazaki Villa Museum (see the photo) with my wife to look at the exhibition of paintings mostly of Impressionism collected by this museum. The museum is located at the southern foot of Mt. Tenno between Kyoto and Osaka.

The building of the museum was originally built by the wealthy businessman Shotaro Kaga (1888–1954) from 1911 to 1929 as his own villa. Around 1990 Asahi Breweries, Ltd. bought the villa and repaired to make it a museum. The annex building to display mainly paintings was also built underground, and the museum was opened in 1996 [1, 2].

Kaga studied in Europe in his young days, and was attracted by the beauty of orchids. He eagerly tried to cultivate orchids at his villa to succeed in developing many new varieties. Near the end of the 2nd World War, soldiers came to ask him to put tanks in the garden of his villa. In spite of their use of violence, he did not accept the request, because he loved peace as well as orchids. He wished to make Japan known in the world not by her military force but by her culture [3].

Leaflet, Asahi Beer Oyamazaki Villa Museum of Art.

Web site, Asahi Beer Oyamazaki Villa Museum.

The story told by a video in the museum.

Quotation from Einstein on Study

2005-06-26T22:15:00.003+09:00

From the necessity of my job, I had been a subscriber to the RSICC Newsletter published monthly and distributed freely by Radiation Safety Information Computational Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, U.S.A. At the top of each issue of this newsletter, a quotation from a wise person of the past is given. I had used to copy it into my computer file. Since several years ago, the newsletter has been an online publication. Thus the copying of the quotation has become easy. However, an easy thing to do is not an attractive thing to do. So I have stopped copying the quotation of the newsletter.

The latest issue [1] of the newsletter carries a quotation from Einstein on study. I like it very much, so that I am citing it below:

Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.--Albert Einstein

RSICC Newsletter No. 484 (June 2005).

Single Gene Changes Sex Orientation of Fruit Flies

2005-06-11T20:06:00.002+09:00

Barry Dickson and colleagues at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna, Austria, published a pair of papers in the 3 June issue of Cellto report on a first elegant demonstration that a single gene can serve as a switch for complex behavior [1, 2].

Miller [2] writes, "The male fruit fly is a winged Casanova. He pursues lady flies with a repertoire of song, dance, and well-placed licks that many find impossible to resist." Female flies altered by the Austrian scientists to use a gene called fruitless (fru) to make proteins normally made by males pursued a waiting virgin female, showing all the components of that repertoire.

This could be an important step toward understanding instinctive human behavior.

References

E. Rosenthal, For Fruit Flies, Gene Shift Tilts Sex Orientation, New York Times (June 3, 2005).

G. Miller, Spliced Gene Determines Objects of Flies' Desire, Science Vol. 308, p. 1392 (2005).

The New Structure of JR Kanazawa Station

2005-06-04T22:04:00.002+09:00

Tsuzumi-mon Gate of JR Kanazawa Station.
I took a train to Kanazawa to attend the reunion of our Elementary School class on June 2. The Asahi-shimbun of that day just carried an article about the start of constructing the new JR line for bullet trains between Toyama and Kanazawa. The article included an air photo of the huge glass dome, "Motenashi (Welcome) Dome," at the East Entrance of the Kanazawa Station completed this spring by spending seven years and 17.2 billion yens.

The dome has a wooden gate (13.5 m high and 24 m wide; see the above photo) symbolizing traditional Japanese instruments called tsuzumi (hand drums). It is named Tsuzumi-mon ("mon" means gate). The whole structure does not seem popular among all the citizens of Kanazawa. During construction I thought it not so good, too. Looking at it as completed, however, I felt it not so bad after all.

Einstein on Space

2005-05-29T21:05:00.000+09:00

In 2001 I read Max Jammer's book on Einstein and religion [1] and liked it very much (see my review [2] of this book). So I bought Jammer's another book on space [3]. The book contains a foreword written by Albert Einstein in 1953, less than two years before his death. The foreword gives me a good understanding of the history of the concept of space, so that I almost feel it unnecessary to read Jammer's book except chapter 6, which was added in the third edition and entitled "Recent Developments."

Einstein writes as follows: There are the two concepts of space: (a) space as positional quality of the world of material objects; (b) space as container of all material objects. In case (a), space without a material object is inconceivable. In case (b), a material object can only be conceived as existing in space.

Einstein further explains like this: Newton's concept of absolute space as the independent cause of the inertial behavior of material bodies corresponds to (b). Leibniz and Huygens resisted to this concept, and the subsequent development supported their resistance, because the concept of the material object as the fundamental concept of physics was gradually replaced by that of the field. If the laws of this field are not dependent on a particular choice of coordinate system, then the introduction of an independent (absolute) space is no longer necessary. -- Einstein adds the words, "There is no space without a field." --

However, Jammer argues in chapter 6 of his book that the Leibniz-Huygens concept of space, called the theory of relational space, is no longer universally accepted, referring to the new version of relationism proposed by Reichenbach and Grünbaum. I would like to write about space again after reading Jammer's new chapter.

M. Jammer, Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology (Princeton University Press, 1999).

A Scholarly Description of Einstein's Religious Philosophy (2001).

M. Jammer, Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space in Physics 3rd enlarged edition (Dover, New York, 1993; 1st edition 1954, 2nd edition 1969, both by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1954).

Einstein on Atomic Bombs

2005-05-22T10:36:00.000+09:00

I have found the following words of Albert Einstein in the May issue of the APS News published by the American Physical Society [1]:

To have security against atomic bombs and against the other biological weapons, we have to prevent war, for if we cannot prevent war every nation will use every means that is at their disposal; and in spite of all promises they make, they will do it. At the same time, so long as war is not prevented, all the governments of the nations have to prepare for war, and if you have to prepare for war, then you are in a state where you cannot abolish war. (Spoken at a one-day conference at the Institute for Advanced Study on November 17, 1946.)

These words are cited in an article by Patricia Rife of the Graduate school of Technology and Management at the University of Maryland's University College. She begins the article by writing, "Albert Einstein was morally opposed to war throughout his life, and this ethical stance had deep roots in his childhood education."

After citing the above words of Einstein near the end of the article, Rife concludes her article as follows: "These words still ring true today, 59 years later. Will a new generation hear them and rise to our own social responsibilities? ... like Einstein ...I continue to work for this ethical stance."

It is wonderful that Einstein contributed to the mankind not only by his incomparable scientific accomplishments but also by these and other heavy words on war and atomic bombs. What would Einstein say if he were alive and heard about the movement of changing the Article 9 (the renunciation of war) of the Constitution of Japan?

P. Rife, "Einstein, Ethics and the Atomic Bomb" APS News, Vol. 14, No. 5, p. 8 (2005). (Article based on a talk given at the 2005 APS March Meeting in Los Angeles.)

Related Sites

A Century of Einstein (MSNBC, May 2005).

Bush vs. Einstein (IDEA-ISAAC Femto-Essay, Feb. 2005).

Classification Schemes of Memory

2005-05-06T20:46:00.000+09:00

As I wrote in a previous blog [1], I learned about a classification scheme of memory from the review [2] of a book [3]. I wanted to learn more about it. At a Web site [4] I have learned the following: There are three schemes of classification of memory, i.e., classification by duration, classification by information type and classification by temporal direction. The scheme I learned before is the first one, and it classifies long-term memory, the largest part of any model about memory, into declarative (explicit) and procedural (or non-declarative; implicit) memories.

The classification by information type deals only with the long-term memory. Then it is not a scheme independent of the classification by duration but the one that subdivides the latter. The explanation of the latter at the above Web site [4] is as follows:

Classification by Duration

A basic and generally accepted classification of memory is based on the duration of memory retention, and identifies three distinct types of memory: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.

The classification by temporal direction is explained as follows:

Classification by Temporal Direction

A further major way to distinguish different memory functions is whether the content to be remembered is in the past, retrospective memory, or whether the content is to be remembered in the future, prospective memory. Thus, retrospective memory as a category includes semantic memory and episodic/autobiographical memory. In contrast, prospective memory is memory for future intentions, or 'remembering to remember' (Winograd, 1988). Prospective memory can be further broken down into event- and time-based prospective remembering. Time-based prospective memories are triggered by a time-cue, such as going to the doctor (action) at 4 pm (cue). Event-based prospective memories are intentions triggered by cues, such as remembering to post a letter (action) after seeing a mailbox (cue). Cues do not need to be related to the action (as the mailbox example is), and lists, sticky-notes, knotted handkerchiefs, or string around the finger are all examples of cues that are produced by people as a strategy to enhance prospective memory.

Can this classification be said to be the one at the same level with the classification by duration from a different viewpoint? Anyway I doubt that prospective memory is essentially different from retrospective memory. The former seems only to be the special case of the latter in which the retrospective content is a decision already made in the form of a schedule related to the future.

I also cite the description about declarative memory [4] below.

Declarative memory requires conscious recall, in that some conscious process must call back the information. It is sometimes called explicit memory, since it consists of information that is explicitly stored and retrieved.

Declarative memory can be further sub-divided into semantic memory, which concerns facts taken independent of context; and episodic memory, which concerns information specific to a particular context, such as a time and place. Semantic memory allows the encoding of abstract knowledge about the world, such as "Paris is the capital of France". Episodic memory, on the other hand, is used for more personal memories, such as the sensations, emotions, and personal associations of a particular place or time. Autobiographical memory - memory for particular events within one's own life - is generally viewed as either equivalent to, or a subset of, episodic memory. Visual memory is part of memory preserving some characteristics of our senses pertaining to visual experience. We are able to place in memory information that resembles objects, places, animals or people in sort of a mental image.

At first I thought that the word "information" used in the review [2] to explain the semantic memory seemed a little odd in the context. Considering the fact that classification of memory can be made by information type, however, the use of the word "information" is quite natural.

Speeding Up of Life at Higher Ages (May 4, 2005).

Y. Dudai, Nature Vol. 434, p. 823 (2005).

D. Draaisma, Why Life speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past translated by A. & E. Pomerans (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Memory - Learn all about Memory (Encyclopedia.lockergnome.com).

Speeding Up of Life at Higher Ages

2005-05-04T20:22:00.000+09:00

We sometimes say, "Time passes faster as we get older." But this is a strange expression, because we cannot define the speed of time. In physics speed is defined as the distance traversed by something within a unit time, and time is not the thing that travels through space. In everyday language the concept of speed is also used to refer to the frequency of some event happening within a unit time. For example, we say about a woman who utters many words within a given duration of time, "She speaks quite quickly." However, time is not an event happening along time either.

In the latest issue of Nature I found a review [1] on the book entitled "Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older" [2]. "Life speeds up." -- This seems to be an appropriate expression. The appropriateness comes quite naturally; the author of the book, Douwe Draaisma, is a historian of psychology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. I wanted to know what was the author's answer to the question "Why does life speed up as you get older?" and read the review.

The reviewer, Yadin Dudai of the Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, writes a brief introduction to the science of memory in the first half of his review. Note that the subtitle of the book reviewed is "How Memory Shapes Our Past." So, I noticed that the central theme of the book is not human perception of time but memory.

From the review we learn the followings: Memory can be classified into "declarative memory" and "non-declarative memory." The latter refers to bodily memory such as habits and modified reflexes. The former refers to conscious memory, and includes "episodic memory" and "semantic memory." "Episodic memory" is mental travel to the personal past, usually involving some re-experienced emotion. "Semantic memory" is acquired information transparent to conscious awareness and not always related to unique personal experience.

Dudai then tells us these: Draaisma's book reminds us that an interest in memory is primarily synonymous with a wish to understand the joy and sorrow of personal memory, i.e., "episodic memory." The book is a fine collection for memory lovers who will appreciate the facts it contains as well as rich metaphors. The title of the book comes from one of touching essays included in it. -- Oh, I could not learn the answer to the question "Why does life speed up as you get older?" --

Then I sought other reviews on Draaisma's book at Amazon.com Web site. There was just one good review written by a customer. The writer, Rob Hardy, is a psychiatrist and is ranked at the 50th among Amazon.com customers who send reviews (by the way, I am the 3537th). He kindly writes what I wanted to know as follows: There is not a fully accepted reason for that question. William James explained in 1890 that in youth, there were novel experiences, something new every day, but that every passing year brought routine that smoothed the days, weeks, and years into a collapse of time. A period full of memories, viewed in retrospect, seems to expand and be fuller and longer. [William James (1842 - 1912) was an American philosopher and psychologist, and was the novelist Henry James's brother.]

Y. Dudai, Nature Vol. 434, p. 823 (2005).

D. Draaisma, Why Life speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past translated by A. & E. Pomerans (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

R. Hardy, Evaluation of Our Real Memories (Amazon.com Web site, 2005).

Hans Bethe Was, So to Say, One of My Teachers

2005-04-28T21:45:00.000+09:00

Hans Albrecht Bethe, one of the giants of 20th century physics, died on March 6, 2005. He was born in 1906 in Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine -- then part of Germany --, studied physics at Frankfurt, and obtained his doctorate from the University of Munich in 1928. In 1933 he moved to England, and in 1935 to America, where he held the chair of physics at Cornell from 1937 until his retirement in 1975. Bethe was one of the key figures in the Manhattan atomic bomb project during the Second World War. After the war he campaigned together with Albert Einstein against nuclear testing and the nuclear arms race. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1967 for his discovery of stellar nucleosynthesis [1-5].

Students who major in nuclear or radiation physics learn the name of Bethe quite early in the lesson of their specialty. His name is associated with equations to express energy losses, due to inelastic and radiative processes, of charged particles passing through matter. Bethe's papers on these equations were published in 1930 [6] and 1934 [7]. In my young days one of the most thoroughly written textbooks on experimental nuclear physics was the one edited by Emilio Segrè [8]. In the first volume of that textbook, there is a chapter written by Bethe and Julius Ashkin (Carnegie Institute of Technology) on the passage of radiations through matter.

I had worked on the passage of fast electrons through matter for many years. So I studied the chapter of Bethe and Ashkin repeatedly. Thus Bethe was, so to say, one of my best teachers. In a humble work of mine [9] I even cited a paper authored by Bethe and his coworkers [10], because the expression in this paper for the transport mean free path of electrons in matter was essentially useful for that work. Further, a little before my retirement from a university I bought the book of Bethe's selected works [11] (see the image above) to make it one of examples of publications of my selected works I edited by myself [12]. By the way, other examples I referred to were "The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein" and "Selected Papers of Freeman Dyson with Commentary." Many scientists possibly regard Bethe as their model in that he published important academic papers at ages over 90.

It is interesting that Bethe so swiftly did the work awarded by the Nobel Prize [2,13]. In 1938 Edward Teller invited Bethe to contribute a paper on astrophysics for a conference the former was organizing. Bethe at first pleaded ignorance of the subject, but under pressure from Teller he finally agreed to search for a relevant topic. The result was the paper on energy production in stars [14].

There are two more interesting facts about Bethe's publications [15]. One is that Bethe submitted a spoof paper [16] to Die Naturwissenschaften with G. Beck and W. Riezler, and it was accepted and published. Bethe wrote [17] about that paper, "The joke was meant to make fun of papers by Eddington in which he claimed to derive the value of the fine structure constant to be 137." The other is that Bethe's name was added in the byline of a letter to the Editor of the Physical Review on the theory evolved by R. A. Alpher under George Gamow's direction [18]. It was Gamow's mischievous idea to make the list of authors, Alpher, Bethe and Gamow, sound like alpha, beta and gamma. It is funny that it is written, "Bethe did, however, contribute with Ralph Alpher to George GamowÉÜs famous 1948 alpha-beta-gamma paper on the origin of the elements and the big bang." in Biographical Encyclopedia of Scientists [2].

The American Institute of Physics had been publishing a series of books named Masters of Modern Physics. The series included a volume of Bethe [19]. I bought it, but have not read it yet. The volume is a collection of Bethe's essays written since the end of the Second World War. In the preface of this book Bethe wrote, "That President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev both agreed that nuclear armaments are absurdly large comes as a modest result of the arms-control effort in which I was joined by many others. Much remains to be done before the world can feel safe from a nuclear holocaust."

The 2005 NPT (the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) Review Conference will soon be held at the UN in New York (from May 2 to 27, 2005). UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the NPT (March 5, 2005), "Today, the NPT confronts profound challenges to its effectiveness and credibility. At the 2005 NPT Review Conference in May, these challenges will test the commitment of all States to the three pillars of the NPT: non-proliferation, disarmament, and peaceful uses of nuclear technology." We expect that the effectiveness and credibility of the NPT be strengthened at the coming review conference to respect Hans Bethe's will.

Hans Bethe - Biography (Nobelprize.org).

J. Daintith, S. Mitchell, E. Tootill and D. Gjertsen, ed., Biographical Encyclopedia of Scientists, 2nd ed., Vol. 1, p. 81 (Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol, 1994).

Atom Bomb Designer Dies (PhysicsWeb, March 8, 2005).

Hans Bethe (Wikipedia).

K. Gottfried and E. E. Salpeter, Nature, 434, 970 (970).

H. A. Bethe, Ann. Physik, 5, 325 (1930).

H. A. Bethe and W. Heitler, Proc. Roy. Soc. (London), A146, 83 (1934).

E. Segrè, ed., Experimental Nuclear Physics, Vols. I-III (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1952-1959).

T. Tabata, R. Ito and S. Okabe, J. Appl. Phys. 42, 3361 (1971).

H. A. Bethe, M. E. Rose and L. P. Smith, Proc. Am. Phil. Soc. 78, 573 (1938).

H. A. Bethe, Selected Works of Hans A Bethe with Commentary (World Scientific, Singapore, 1997).

T. Tabata, ed., Abstracts of Selected Papers of Tatsuo Tabata and His Coworkers Vol. 1 and 2 (available as PDF files from the IDEA Web site) (IDEA, 2002, 2003).

O. Klein, The Nobel Prize in Physics 1967: Presentation Speech (1967).

H. A. Bethe, Phys. Rev. 55, 434 (1939).

E. Mendoza, ed., A Random Walk in Science: An Anthology Compiled by R. L. Weber, pp. 24 and 70 (Inst. Phys. London, 1973).

G. Beck, H. Bethe and W. Riezler, Naturwissenschaften, 19, 39 (1931).

Page 185 of Ref. 11.

R. A. Alpher, H. Bethe and G. Gamow, Phys. Rev. 73, 803 (1948).

H. A. Bethe, The Road from Los Alamos (Amer. Inst. Phys., 1991).

The Visiting Scientist from China

2005-04-15T20:05:00.000+09:00

A friend of mine in USA, J.H., forwarded me e-mail messages exchanged between him and the Chinese scientist, Dr. L.Z. The latter is now a visiting researcher at Osaka University. Thinking this a good chance to make another overseas friend of mine, I sent an e-mail message as cited below to Dr. L.Z. I had to say a little about the present political problems between China and Japan. He promptly replied to it with kind words. Scientists seem to be better at having peaceful relations than politicians.

Dear Dr. L.Z.,

I am writing this message to you, because last evening J.H. forwarded me e-mail messages exchanged between you and him.

You seem to be working at an institute of Osaka University as a guest scientist from China on nuclear reactions by the use of laser beams. Right?

I had been working on the passage of fast electrons through matter and electron-beam dosimetry at RIAST Institute, Osaka Prefecture University, located in Sakai, Osaka. After retirement, I have my own institute at my home; it is named Institute for Data Evaluation and Analysis (IDEA).

I have some good Chinese friends in Shanghai, Beijing, Dalian, etc., and feel very sorry that China and Japan have political problems now. I believe that the attitude of Koizumi Cabinet towards the past war is quite wrong.

I should be glad if I could have a chance of seeing you in the near future.

Sincerely,
Tatsuo Tabata

"September Affair"

2005-02-22T20:12:00.000+09:00

Yesterday I watched the 1950 American film "September Affair" on TV. The director of the film was William Dieterle. The story goes like this:

During the time of plane engine troubles, the pianist Marina Stuart (Joan Fontaine) and the engineer David Lawrence (Joseph Cotten) go sightseeing in Naples. When they have come back to the airport, the plane just flies away, and their continued short trip leads to deeper emotions. Then they learn from a newspaper that the plane they are supposed to be on has been crashed to kill all the passengers. They decide to change their world forever. ...

The scenery of Rome, Naples, Pompeii, Capri and Florence reminded me of the group trip my wife and I joined in May 2003, and I much liked this classic, short-lived love story. (You can see some sketches and photos of our trip to Italy at my website [1, 2].)

Sketches in Italy.

Thirteen-Day Travel to Italy: Selected Photos.

Bush vs. Einstein

2005-02-12T19:45:00.000+09:00

The U.S. President George W. Bush delivered the State of the Union speech on February 2, 2005. It included the following passages [1]:

Pursuing our enemies is a vital commitment of the war on terror, ... During this time of war we must continue to support our military and give them the tools for victory.

America will stand with the allies of freedom to support democratic movements in the Middle East and beyond, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

And because democracies respect their own people and their neighbors, the advance of freedom will lead to peace.

Right now, Americans in uniform are serving at posts across the world, often taking great risks on my orders. ... The volunteers of our military are unrelenting in battle, unwavering in loyalty, unmatched in honor and decency, and every day they are making our nation more secure.

In spite of many use of the words, "freedom," "democracy" and "liberty," President Bush's speech is in contradiction to these words as well as to recent facts. The first passage cited above shows that he considers the war in Iraq was the one on terror, but it was not. Attack on Iraq was started on the wrong assumption of her having illicit weapons stockpiles.

In the second to fourth passages cited, President Bush shows his wish to expand democracies to other countries by U.S. Forces to make U.S.A. more secure and the world peaceful. However, making attack on a country without the United Nation's support is to violate international democracy, and a trial to advance freedom by war would only destroy peace for a long time.

The following words by Albert Einstein [2] sound like the prediction of President Bush's distorted policy:

General fear and anxiety create hatred and aggressiveness. The adaptation to warlike aims and activities has corrupted the mentality of man.

Einstein uttered these words in his address at the second annual dinner given by the Foreign Press Association of the United Nations, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York, November 11, 1947.

At the end of the address Einstein said, "We scientists believe that what we and our fellow-men do or fail to do within the next few years will determine the fate of our civilization." However, the goal of the comprehensive renunciation of nuclear weapons is still far, so that scientists and their fellow-men and fellow-women have much to do for this purpose.

Transcript: President Bush's State of the Union Address (nytimes.com, February 3, 2005).

Albert Einstein, "The Menace of Mass Destruction" in Essays in Humanism (Philosophical Library, New York, 1950).

Serenades Played by Erhu

2005-02-02T19:52:00.000+09:00

A young friend of mine, Yoro, is running a small company to make and sell CDs in Ebetsu, Hokkaido. Last week I ordered him a CD [1] made in China and sold by his company. It is a collection of serenades played by Zhu Changyao with an erhu by the accompaniment of the Orchestra of the Music and Dance Troop of Jiangsu Province of China. Zhu Changyao is a famous Chinese erhu virtuoso and composer. The erhu is a traditional Chinese string instrument with two strings.

The CD arrived this afternoon. It includes "English Serenade," Schumann's "Träumerei," Dvorak's "Humoresque," Schubert's "Lullaby," De Curtis's "Come Back to Sorrento," Brahms's "Lullaby," etc. Listening to those well-known pieces of music played with an erhu in calm and nostalgic tone, my heart, being hurt by dark pieces of news these days, was much soothed and warmed, though it was very cold today.

"Zhu Changyao's Art of Erhu No. 4: Serenade" (Jiangsu Culture Audio and Video Publishing House, China; dealt by Booxbox).

The Physicist Who Became Death

2004-12-29T20:54:00.000+09:00

Quoting the Bhagavad-Gita, the holy book of the Hindus, J. Robert Oppenheimer said, "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds" when he saw the large cloud of the test atomic bomb rising over the New Mexico desert in 1945. Thus he may be a devil for the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, he was, in a sense, a victim of the war himself. A commission to investigate his loyalty rendered in 1954 its judgment that Oppenheimer was unfit to serve his country, U.S.A. [1].

I have read an article "Remembering Oppenheimer: The Teacher, The Man" [2] by Edward Gerjuoy, professor of physics emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh. Gerjuoy describes the observation of Oppenheimer he made as a graduate student in the UC-Berkeley physics department from 1938 to 1942. I give here a much-abridged version of Gerjuoy's passages about Oppie's style of teaching (Gerjuoy have called Oppenheimer Oppie since his student days):

Oppie gave no final exams or any other tests. He did not designate a textbook for any of his courses (the hypermodern materials he taught could not be found in any of the then available textbooks). He delivered a class lecture at high speed along with numerous equations written on the board and chain smoking. His relations with his students were surprisingly informal. The seminar was Oppie's domain, his fiefdom. Despite his sometimes overly ferocious questioning, his students respected him and felt indebted to him. ...

The physicist who became Death had a good face as a teacher of physics. Some classmates of mine at a university knew very well about textbooks on physics, and said that one of the best textbooks for electrodynamics was Oppie's. At that time (late 1950s) I sought a Japanese translation of that book at bookstores, but could not find one. I now find an English edition (possibly a revised edition) at Amazon [3].

By the way, many famous physicists were also a good teacher and ferocious questioner at the seminar. I liked to organize seminars in my work years at an institute and a university, and wanted to be a ferocious questioner, though I may not have been successful in it.

J. Daintith, et al. ed., Biographical Encyclopedia of Scientists, 2nd edition (Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol, 1994).

E. Gerjuoy, APS News, Vol. 13, No. 10, p. 8 (November 2004).

J. R. Oppenheimer, Lectures on Electrodynamics (Gordon & Breach, 1970) (Out of print--limited availability).

Math Could Help Art History

2004-12-28T20:07:00.000+09:00

Authors of novels have been identified through context-free word counts. Similarly, one might be able to identify painters by analyzing the frequency of certain types of curves. This was the idea of the mathematician Hany Farid and two colleagues at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, U.S.A. [1].

They have developed an approach that builds a statistical model of an artist from the scans of a set of authenticated works against which new works are compared. The statistical model consists of first- and higher-order "wavelet decomposition." They have analyzed 13 (8 true and 5 false) drawings that have been attributed to the 16th century artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and have gotten the results that confirm expert authentications [2].

The researchers have also applied these techniques to determining the number of artists that may have contributed to the painting "Madonna with Child" attributed to the 16th century Italian painter Pietro Perugino, and again have achieved an analysis agreeing with expert opinion [2].

This indicates the possibility that the computer can help research in art history, rendering one of examples of cooperation between arts and science in a broad sense.

"Verifying art with math" Science, Vol. 306, 1678 (2004).

S. Lyu, D. Rockmore and H. Farid, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. Vol. 101, 17006 (2004).

All Humans Share a Close Relation II

2004-12-16T09:37:00.000+09:00

A reader of my previous blog [1] has told me about the origin of the idea that six times of tracing of acquaintanceship covers almost all the people the world over. It is the concept termed "six degrees of separation" proposed by the American social psychologist Stanley Milgram (1933-1984) in 1967.

Searching the name of this concept by Google, I found a piece of Web site news [2] about an experiment related to the concept. From this piece of news I noticed this: It was the original article [3] on this experiment published by Duncan Watts and colleagues at Columbia University in New York that was vaguely in my memory and made me write the blog mentioned above.

In the experiment by the researchers at Columbia University more than 60,000 people from 166 different countries took part. Participants were assigned one of 18 target people, and were asked to contact that person by sending email to people they already knew. The researchers found that in most cases it took between five and seven emails to contact the target. The result did not indicate that the email had made the world a more close-knit community, but confirmed the validity of Milgram's concept, which had emerged from a similar postal experiment [2].

"All humans share a close relation" (2004).

W. Knight, "Email experiment confirms six degrees of separation" NewScientist.com News Service (Aug. 7, 2003).

P. S. Dodds, R. Muhamad, D. J. Watts, "An experimental study of search in global social networks" Science, Vol. 301, p. 827 (2003).

All Humans Share a Close Relation I

2004-12-08T09:16:00.000+09:00

I read a story like this somewhere: If we trace acquaintanceship starting from a single person to that person's acquaintances, to the acquaintances of those acquaintances, to the acquaintances of those acquaintances' acquaintances, etc., then six times of this tracing covers almost all the people around the world (I'm not sure about the number six, but the calculation explained below shows that this is a reasonable number). Only six times! It means that all humans are in a rather close relationship.

A simple calculation convinces us of the above story. I send New Year and Christmas cards to a total of more than 150 people. I have much more acquaintances than this number, because I also know families of some friends of mine and have acquaintances to whom I don't send the cards. However, this number is possibly much larger than the average number of a person's acquaintances if we take small children and babies into account. Therefore, I divide 150 by 3, and assume the average number of acquaintances to be 50. Tracing acquaintances with this assumed number makes the number of people increase by the multiplication factor of 50 at each step. The final number becomes 50⁶.

Actually, there is overlapping of acquaintances, so that the number does not increase this fast. But I already made a mean estimate in choosing the number 50. Further, this is a rough calculation to find the order of magnitude. So, believe that the final number shown above is a good estimate. That number is calculated to be about 16 billion. The population of the world is about 6.4 billion. Thus the former well covers the latter. Q.E.D.

I thought of this close human relationship from the word "friends of friends of yours" in the e-mail messages of the social networking service "Echoo!" I have joined.

"Blog" Top Word of 2004

2004-12-06T20:52:00.000+09:00

U.S. dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster Inc. announced on November 30 its "Words of the Year 2004" [1]. These are determined by the statistics of online lookups at the publisher's Web sites. The No.1 Word of the Year was:

Blog noun [short for Weblog] (1999): a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer

Blog will be a new entry in the 2005 version of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.

The other words in the top-ten list are as follows:

2. incumbent
3. electoral
4. insurgent
5. hurricane
6. cicada
7. peloton
8. partisan
9. sovereignty
10. defenestration

Eight entries among the top ten is related to major news events from the presidential election to natural phenomena.

How many of the above words do you know? Clicking these words at the Merriam-Webster OnLine site provides their definitions.

The year 2004 was just the year when I began to use blog sites.

Publisher: 'Blog' No. 1 word of the year, CNN.com (November 30, 2004).

Will Women Sprinters Win Men?

2004-10-11T22:35:00.000+09:00

Scientists in UK and Kenya reported the result of research that the winning women's 100-meter sprint time of 8.079 second would be faster than that of the men's winning time of 8.098 for the first time ever at the 2156 Olympics [1]. Their analysis is based on the data on the winning times of the men's and women's Olympic finals over the past 100 years.

According to the supplementary information at Nature's website, the data span the years from 1928 to 2004 (76 years) for women, and from 1900 to 2004 (104 years) for men. After testing a range of curve-fitting procedures, the scientists adopted the simple linear relationships between the Olympic year and the winning time. The extrapolation to the year 2156 goes ahead for 152 years, just two times of the time span in which the data for women exist.

From my much experience of curve fitting to data [2], I suppose that the validity of such wild extrapolation is quite dubious. It is just a child's guesswork. Reliable extrapolation would be up to the year of about 2042 (2004 plus a half of 76). -- Can I live until that year? -- If the linear decrease of the winning time goes on and on, there would come the year when one can reach the goal in no time (this is a child's words).

A. J. Tatem, C. A. Guerra, P. M. Atkinson and S. I. Hay, Nature Vol. 431, p. 525 (2004).

See the list of my academic papers.

Words about 2004 Physics Nobel Prize

2004-10-08T14:44:00.000+09:00

On October 5, 2004, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2004 "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction" jointly to three US professors [1]. The two of them, David Gross of the University of California at Santa Barbara and Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported their discovery in Physical Review Letters in 1973 [2]. The other recipient David Politzer of the California Institute of Technology published his papers in the same issue of the journal [3]; Wilczek and Politzer were only graduate students at the time [4].

The force of the strong interaction they studied is also called "color force." Thus the press release [1] of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was humorously entitled "A 'colorful' discovery in the world of quarks." Quarks are the particles that constitute the proton and the neutron. The title of the Nobel Prize news [2] at PhysicsWeb site, maintained by the Institute of Physics, is also funny: "Strong-force theorists scoop Nobel prize." This sounds as if the theorists got the prize by their brute strength.

The Asahi Shimbun of Japan posted an English article "On a par with Einstein: Nambu ahead of his time for Nobel" at its website [5]. The article says, "While acknowledging 83-year-old Yoichiro Nambu's achievements, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences took the rare step of explaining why it did not award him the Nobel Prize in Physics," and cites the words of the academy, "As we shall see, Nambu's field theory had all the relevant details of the correct theory, but it was perhaps too early and the focus was on other problems at the time."

Surely, Nambu did a pioneering work related to the strong interaction. However, the report of the Asahi is written somewhat too sensationally. It makes the reader think that a mention about Nambu was especially made in the press release, but the fact is that the citation is taken from a detailed account of the discovery made by the three Nobel laureates [6]; the account includes the historical background of the study on the forces of nature made by Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, James Clark Maxwell, Hideki Yukawa and many others, though a lot of lines are devoted to Nambu.

It is regrettable for Nambu that he missed the Nobel Prize, but he is well known to have been a "prophet" of physics. I believe that this fame is a great award for him not inferior to the Nobel prize.

"Press Release: The 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics," Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (Oct. 5, 2004).

"Ultraviolet Behavior of Non-Abelian Gauge Theories," D. J. Gross and F. Wilczek, Phys. Rev. Lett. Vol. 30, p. 1343 (1973).

"Reliable Perturbative Results for Strong Interactions?," H. D. Politzer, ibid. p. 1346 (1973).

"Strong-force theorists scoop Nobel prize," PhysicsWeb (Oct. 5, 2004).

"On a par with Einstein," The Asahi Shimbun (Oct. 7, 2004).

"Advanced Information: The 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics," Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (Oct. 5, 2004).

The Artist Ichiro's Perspiration

2004-10-04T20:06:00.000+09:00

In the final game of this season on October 3, 2004, Ichiro Suzuki of Seattle Mariners established a new record, 262, for the number of hits in a season of major league baseball. The previous record was 287 set by George Sisler in 1920.

While he was still fighting for a tie, a report in the New York Times praised him to be "an artist who makes the field his canvas," analyzing his five techniques of batting [1]. Those were the chop, the flip, the seeker, the standard and the power stroke.

What made possible his artistic play? Thomas Edison used to say, "Genius was 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." Ichiro surely has inspiration, but a glimpse of his much perspiration can be made in his attitude of living; he neither goes to see movies to protect his eyes, nor plays golf not to destroy his batting form. Persons of every profession should learn such a use of great moderation.

When he broke his own record of the number of hits in a season, Ichiro said, "I want to go over my own best, and it is challenging to do so, so far as it is a possibility." These words also reflect his constant perspiration.

Now there are many fans of Ichiro in USA and Japan. However, I am one of the oldest fans of Ichiro, because my favorite Japanese baseball team has been Orix Blue Wave, to which he belonged before joining the major league. That team is now going to be united with Kintetsu Buffaloes to become Orix Buffaloes. The manager Akira Ogi who brought up Ichiro comes back as the manager of the new team. Can he foster another Ichiro?

L. Jenkins, New York Times (Sep. 14, 2004)

The Rainbow

2004-10-02T20:00:00.001+09:00

Rainbow seen in Sakai after the passage of typhoon 21.
Last Friday typhoon 21 passed through Kyushu, Shikoku and Kinki District, and gave much damage at many places, especially in Mie Prefecture, due to heavy rainfall. Another thing it brought was a rainbow seen here in Sakai next morning.

Leonard Mlodinow writes the following story in his book "Feynman's Rainbow" [1]: On one of the last days in his life, Richard Feynman was gazing at a rainbow, and asked Mlodinow what he thought was the salient feature of the rainbow that had inspired Descartes' mathematical analysis of it. The latter gave elaborate guesses based on the geometrical and physical nature of the rainbow, but Feynman simply said this: It might have been that Descartes thought rainbows were beautiful.

You can learn about Descartes' analysis of the rainbow at websites [2,3].

L. Mlodinow, "Feynman's Rainbow," pp. 117 and 118 (Warner Books, New York, 2003); Read my review of this book.

Unidata -- About Rainbows.

Rainbows.

"Rule of Law at Risk"

2004-09-30T10:16:00.000+09:00

The United Nations General Assembly had the first day of its annual top-level debate on September 21, 2004. In an address to the Assembly, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said as follows [1]:

Today the rule of law is at risk around the world. Again and again, we see fundamental laws shamelessly disregarded -- those that ordain respect for innocent life, for civilians, for the vulnerable -- especially children.

Annan mentioned situations in Iraq, Darfur, northern Uganda, Beslan and Israel as only a few examples of the shameless disregard for the rule. His words are heavy and respectable. Politicians of every nation should pay serious attention to his words, and people of every nation should not vote for those politicians who neglect his words.

Earlier than the above address, in an interview with the BBC on September 15, Annan said more severely that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was illegal because it violated the U.N. Charter [2].

Note added later: The title of a story published at the PhysicsWeb site recently [3] was "Law-breaking liquid defies the rules." I wondered what would be a Japanese translation of this title to be put at my website, because I thought the words "law" and "rules" had the same meaning. The story was about the strange behavior of a liquid to "freez" when it is heated. The title must have been a modification of Annan's words "the rule of law," in which "rule" has a meaning different from law, i.e. "control."

"Rule of law at risk around the world, says Secretary-General in address to General Assembly," UN Press Release SG/SM/9491, GA/10258 (2004).

Reuters (September 15, 2004).

"Law-breaking liquid defies the rules," PhysicsWeb News (Sep. 24, 2004)

Taming Typhoons

2004-09-29T09:48:00.000+09:00

Typhoon 21 attacked Okinawa and is coming to Kyushu, Shikoku and the Mainland of Japan. It is the eighth that came to Japan this year. The number is a new record in the weather observation history of Japan. Violent hurricanes also gave much damage in U.S.A this year. -- Huge rotating storms are called typhoons in the western Pacific, hurricanes in the Atlantic and the eastern Pacific oceans, and cyclones in the Indian Ocean. -- Many years ago there was a guess that nuclear power might be useful to moderate these wild tempests, but it has not been realized. Radioactive waste produced by that method would cause a serious problem. Chaotic behavior of weather, on the other hand, gives a hint at a more practicable method.

In the October 2004 issue of Scientific American, Ross N. Hoffman, a principal scientist and vice president for research and development at Atmospheric and Environment Research in Lexington, Mass. U.S.A., writes about the study being made by him and his coworkers for taming hurricanes [1]. They are using computer models to simulate hurricanes. Altering several of initial conditions in the model, including its temperature and humidity at various points, they have found that the tracks of the simulated storms veer or that maximum velocities are reduced. Hoffman writes near the end of his article:

If our understanding of cloud physics, computer simulation of clouds and data assimilation techniques advance as quickly as we hope, these modest trials [to enhance rainfalls] could be instituted in perhaps 10 to 20 years.

It seems to be a long way to achieve larger-scale weather control by the use of space-based heating. A fantastic idea is said to be "a cloud of words" [also in Japanese: "kumo wo tsukamu yona hanashi (a story like catching a cloud)"]. However, we heard a good piece of news: After a long succession of dry days in Shanghai this summer, they succeeded in causing artificial rainfall by shooting metallic seeds from a plane into clouds. Let us wish that the realization of moderating typhoons comes not so far in the future.

R. N. Hoffman, "Controlling Hurricanes," Sci. Amer. Vol. 291, No. 4, p. 38 (2004).

One of Victims of Iraq War?

2004-09-14T20:35:00.000+09:00

I attended the reunion of Dalian Reizen Elementary School held in Tokyo past Sunday, and came back in a brown suit with a black suitcase today. On a narrow road not far from my house someone spoke to me from the back in English. It was a young man of an Asian look. He spoke so quickly that I failed to catch his words well. He said, "Do you speak English?" I said, "Yes." So he continued in English. His words seemed to mean that he was a naval pilot and came back from Iraq. He said, "General, don't you go to Iraq?" I said, "I'm not General, but a retired scientist." He spoke in a quick manner again. I said, "You speak so fast that I don't understand you."

Then he changed his talk to Japanese. He told me the followings: He lived in New Mexico, and is now engaged in construction work here in Japan. He comes to see his parents who live near here. However, his father, born in 1933, once said to him, "Never come back again!" So he is very nervous to visit his parents. He also told me about his broken glasses and took them out of a bag to show me them.

We came to the fork of our roads. I could only wish him good luck. He told me great thanks for my having conversation with him and said that his name was A... O... It was an American name (the first name was the one I remember from "Gone with the Wind"). I told him my name. We shook hands and parted.

I suppose this: After being engaged in the Iraq War, he did not want to go back to U.S.A. in fear of another flight for combat. Thus he came to his native country, but his parents don't welcome him because he had once gone to U.S.A. without their consent. He is so much Americanized that it is difficult for him to get friends here.

Accidental Factors of Life

2004-09-06T09:42:00.000+09:00

Armed Chechen and Arab terrorists seized a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, Russia, from September 1 to 3, 2004. The seizure ended violently with the death of more than 330 people. It is especially sad that half of the victims were children.

Some may think that God decides one' life. Some may think that the destiny due to some unknown power predetermines life. Some others may think that life is made up by the combination of one's own efforts and accidental factors such as heredity, time and place of birth and living, etc. I belong to the third group. The relative effects of the accidental factors become large in the era and districts of wars and terrorism, making people's efforts nullifying.

We have to make every effort to minimize the accidental factors by stopping wars and terrorism. The attack on Afghanistan and the Iraq War proved that wars are not effective to end terrorism. The source of terrorism may lie in history, but it cannot be an excuse for the cruelty of terrorists' treating innocent people inhumanely. Only patient negotiations and mutual understanding might solve the problem.

My Small Contribution to Feynman Stamp

2004-09-04T20:53:00.000+09:00

I did not remember what I had written to recommend Richard Feynman for the U.S. postage stamp (see the previous story), but found a copy of the recommendation letter in the hard disk of my computer. I cite it below for the interest of the readers of my essays. I wrote about a relation between Feynman's wonderful work and the humble work of my coworker and me in the third paragraph. Though it is a minor relation, I believe that it made my letter unique.

July 13, 1996

Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee
L'Enfant Plaza, Washington D. C.

Dear Sir,

I am writing to urge you to support our wish that Richard Feynman should be honored with a commemorative postage stamp.

Richard Feynman shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga for their work on relativistic quantum electrodynamics (QED). QED is an amazingly accurate theory about the behavior of elementary particles, and Feynman's contribution is especially unique in that he invented and used a method called "path integral approach," aided by diagrams that simply depicted different orders of physical processes (Feynman diagrams).

Not only have Feynman diagrams become the standard language of theories for elementary particles, atomic nuclei and condensed matter, but also they have had influences on workers in a broad area of applied sciences. For example, my coworker and I have been working in the field of radiation physics, and have developed a semi-empirical algorithm to evaluate dose distributions given by electron beams in multilayer absorbers. At first it seemed to be quite difficult to extend the algorithm beyond three layers. From Feynman diagrams, however, I hit upon using schematic diagrams to depict different possible paths of electrons that passed through boundaries between different media. Thus the extension of the algorithm to more layers became a simple task.

Japan's first Nobel laureate, Hideki Yukawa, was honored with a commemorative postage stamp of our country in 1985, which was the occasion of the jubilee of his meson theory. The second Nobel laureate, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, will surely get the same commemoration soon. We heartily wish to see one of the sharers of the Nobel Prize with Tomonaga smiling on a postage stamp of U.S.A. Because of his amiable character and ingenuity on top of his memorable accomplishments, there are many fans of Richard Feynman in Japan.

Sincerely yours,
Tatsuo Tabata
Professor
Research Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
Osaka Prefecture University

Feynman Is About to Come on Postage Stamps

2004-09-02T21:49:00.000+09:00

After a long while I revisited the "Friends of Tuva" website, and found the news "Feynman stamp to become a reality in 2005." The news had a link to a web page at the CBSNews.com site. The article on that page, dated August 14, 2004, has the title "Fonda, Garbo, Headline Stamps," and carries the photo of the actress Greta Garbo.

Patiently reading the paragraphs of the article down, down, down, ... to the seventh paragraph, I finally found the name of the Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman (1918—1988). This is because the media first write about celebrities (famous persons in the entertainment business). Deplorably to scientists, non-celebrities come second. Anyway, it is a piece of highly good news for me, one of many Feynman fans. Other scientists who are coming on stamps in 2005 are the geneticist Barbara McClintock (1902—1992), the thermodynamicist Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839—1903) and the mathematician John von Neumann (1903—1957).

Dave Failor, the executive director of Stamp Services for the U.S. Postal Service, is cited to have said, "These four American scientists that we picked out are people that have had a tremendous impact on our history and on our culture over the years." I am one of those who sent a letter to recommend Feynman for the postage stamp through Friends of Tuva. My letter seems to have had an infinitesimally small but finite effect on the decision to include Feynman in the 2005 U.S. stamp program.

Intellectually Pleasing Movie

2004-08-25T09:35:00.000+09:00

I saw the 2003 French-Portuguese movie "Un film Parlé (A Talking Picture)" directed by Manoel de Oliveira who was 95 years old. I saw two movies directed by him before. Those were "The Letter" (based on the novel "The Princess of Cleves") and "The Principle of Uncertainty" (see my essays of July 7, 2001, and June 14, 2003), and I liked both of them.

In "Un film Parlé" a history professor, Rosa Maria (acted by Leonor Silveira), goes on a cruise to meet her husband, an airline pilot, in India, together with her little daughter Maria Joana (Filipa de Almeida) through the Mediterranean Sea. In the port cities where their ship makes a stop, they visit historical places, and the mother gives lectures to her daughter. On the ship, Captain John Walesa (John Malkovich) has a dinner with famous women from Marseilles (Catherine Deneuve), Naples (Stefania Sandrelli) and Athens (Irene Papas), and they carry on a conversation about civilization, politics and philosophy in four languages.

Finally a dreadful episode comes, but the scene of disaster is shown only indirectly. It is wonderful that the film was planned before the "September 11" terrorist attack foreseeing the situations of the present world. Rosa Maria's lecture, deepened by Maria Joana's naïve questions, and the conversation among Captain and the three women seem to represent the director's thought about civilization and the future of the world that these should be peacefully kept by seeking coexistence of different cultures. I found this film intellectually very pleasing.

The Japanese title of the movie is "Towa no Katarai," meaning an eternal conversation. It is more elegant than the original title. It was also a pleasure to me that the film showed an old castle, Castel dell'Ovo (the Castle of Egg), in Naples, which I sketched last year (see the sketch).

Munch's "The Scream" Stolen

2004-08-24T09:25:00.000+09:00

On August 23 the media reported that armed robbers stole a version of Edvard Munch's masterpiece, "The Scream," from Munch Museum in Oslo together with a version of another key work, "Madonna". The robbery happened in daytime with close to 80 people milling around in the galleries. I was quite surprised at this piece of news, because I wrote the story of research on "The Scream" on this blog page only a few days ago.

In 1994, another and perhaps better-known version of "The Scream" disappeared from the National Gallery, also in Oslo. It was recovered undamaged three months later and remains in that gallery. Art experts are reported to have said that given the fame of both "The Scream" and "Madonna," it would be nearly impossible to sell them to a collector and that the thieves would demand some form of ransom as happened in 1994 (New York Times). I heartily wish that the two works stolen this time also be retrieved safely.

Museum of Art in Small City

2004-08-22T21:29:00.002+09:00

The garden of the Museum of Modern Art, Toyama
Early this month I visited my relatives in Toyama Prefecture, which is located in the Middle District of Japan facing the Japan Sea. On that occasion I went to Toyama City and visited the Museum of Modern Art, Toyama. The exhibition entitled "A Beautiful Journey ... of Life" was being held there. It was a small but wonderful exhibition with about 70 works produced by about 60 artists and brought from different museums in Japan. The artists included Paul Cezanne, Harue Koga, Saburo Miyamoto, Claude Monet, and Pierre Auguste Renoir. The works were displayed under six themes such as "Beginning and Bonds," "Love and Passion," "Dreams and Universe," etc.

The Museum has a video corner, where one can personally choose and watch a title one likes. There I chose a video about Paul Klee. Its early part was about the environments of his birth and growing up. I became drowsy ...

After a while I found that on the video monitor there was nothing going on. The video came to the end during my long nap! Then I went to the cafe of the Museum, and had a cup of coffee. From the windows of the cafe a wide garden full of green trees were seen. It was a quiet afternoon in an unexpectedly good museum in a small city. — Thus I enjoyed "a beautiful journey ... of my summer life" this year. —

Note added later: My works mentioned in comments on this essay can be browsed: sketches in Austria and the watercolor "Ashiya Catholic Church".