On Kamefuchi's Essay about Heisenberg and Yukawa (1)

Kamefuchi's essay published in the magazine Tosho

1. Introduction

Recently, I read the essay "The life of heroes" [1] by theoretical physicist and Professor Emeritus of the University of Tsukuba, Susumu Kamefuchi. The heroes mean here two giants in his field, Werner Heisenberg and Hideki Yukawa. What the author writes is "witness testimony" of the heroes' tragedies in their later years.

Heisenberg's tragedy occurred at the International Conference on High Energy Physics held at CERN in July 1958. The chairperson Pauli began to attack violently against his lecture, denying his study [2] altogether.

Yukawa's tragic incident happened at the International Conference on Particles and Fields held at the University of Rochester in August 1967. He was chairing a session, and his collaborator K was going to give a talk on the paper [3] co-authored with the former. Then, most of the audience stood up from their seats and left the room.

The author writes that he was worried about degrading the heroes, but that he recalled it essential to convey the truth.

In the present article, I describe and discuss some of the things I learned from other sources in connection with Kamefuchi's essay.

2 Heisenberg's tragedy

2.1 Description in Polkinghorne's book

Kamefuchi begins to write the stories saying, "these seem not much talked about." However, I recently read the same story about Heisenberg in a book [4]. The author of the book is a British theoretical physicist, theologian, and Anglican priest, Polkinghorne. He describes twenty international conferences on high energy physics from 1950 to 1980 to make this book a unique history book of this field of research. In the book, Polkinghorne writes in a slightly more detailed manner than in Kamefuchi's essay by citing, from the proceedings, Pauli's words of the attack on Heisenberg's speech. The book also has a photo of Pauli at that time, with the caption including his remark, "No credits for the future," on Heisenberg's speech. The story ends with the following words, which are sympathetic to Heisenberg.

It was a scene at once farcical and sad. Justification lay with the sceptical Pauli but Heisenberg was one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century who should have been able to enjoy a more dignified close to his career. ([4] p. 77)

Readers of this article may wonder that the book on the history of physics contains emotional words, so I would like to add some explanations about the character of this book. This is not a textbook with an objective description or a non-emotional scholarly book, but a book for the general public. (The general public here might be limited to those who are mainly interested in science. I read this book as a person who thinks high energy physics as one of his hobbies.) Thus, the descriptions in this book are rather light-hearted and make fun reading materials that convey the atmosphere of the conference and the characteristics of famous scholars. We can also infer the nature of this book from the fact that the title and subtitle include the words "roundabout" and "story," respectively.

2.2 Chair Pauli's assault

Kamefuchi describes the chair Pauli's behavior as follows [1]: "He stood up, spoke in place of the speaker, behaved increasingly violent, and got so abusive as I have never heard in a physics conference." Some may wonder: Why did no participants protest the chair's behavior? The answer can be imagined from the following. Before the above description, Kamefuchi writes as follows: At the beginning, the chair Pauli, who was well known for his harshness, expressed the following introductory words, "I don't think there are any new ideas, but I'll open the session anyway."

Polkinghorne writes these Pauli's words in more detail and once again gives his personal opinion:

It would be of no use waving your hands in front of him and expressing the hope that it would all work out right in the end. ([4] p. 77)

At this point, Pauli already brought the entire audience to his knees, and no one could dare to advise him, who was famous for his effective spiciness.

References

1. S. Kamefuchi, Tosho No. 859, pp. 18–22 (2020).
2. W. Heisenberg, "Research on the non-linear spinor theory with indefinite metric in Hilbert space" in 1958 Annual International Conference on High Energy Physics at CERN, pp. 851–857 (CERN, Geneva, 1960).
3. Y. Katayama, "Space-time picture of elementary particles" in Proceedings of the 1967 International Conference on Particles and Fields, Ed. C. R. Hagen, G. Guralnik and V. A. Mathur (Interscience, New York, 1967) p. 157.
4. J. C. Polkinghorne, Rochester Roundabout: The Story of High Energy Physics, (W. H. Freeman, New York, 1989) p. 77.

(To be continued)
Serch word: Kamefuchi-2020