On Kamefuchi's Essay about Heisenberg and Yukawa (2)

D. C. Cassidy's Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg.

2 Heisenberg's tragedy (continued)

2.3 Heisenberg's research at that time

Kamefuchi calls Heisenberg's research at that time "monistic field theory of elementary particles" and explains it as a big idea to derive all elementary particles starting from a single field (or equation). Then, Kamefuchi stated as follows: "I first learned of this in a newspaper, so he probably made a press conference and announced it. At that time, he might have used the adjective 'universal' for the basic equation, and it was erroneously freported as "the equation of the cosmos" in Japan."

I also saw the newspaper article about this research of Heisenberg and wrote it down in the diary at that time. It was just before my graduation from university. The diary reads:

February 27, 1958
I have found the following article in the Asahi Shimbun:

[Göttingen (West Germany) 25th UP=Kyodo] At the University of Göttingen on the 25th, Professor Heisenberg, Nobel Prize winner in physics of West Germany, gave a lecture entitled "Advancement of Elementary-Particle Theory." He announced that the research group led by him made research on "unified field theory" and found a basic equation that could explain all laws of physics without exception. The theory was the one that Dr. Einstein also thought about. ...

March 13, 1958
[Here is the clipping of the Asahi Shimbun article entitled "This is the equation of the cosmos." It showed the basic formula of elementary particles found by Heisenberg and his coauthors.]

I posted the copy of the diary on a page [5] of my website and destroyed the original diary. So, I do not have the clipping of "This is the equation of the cosmos" but will show the formula copied from another source later. According to the first newspaper article, Heisenberg did not hold a press conference as Kamefuchi supposed, but newspaper reporters listened to his lecture at the University of Göttingen and wrote about it. This is also clear from the following description in the biography of Heisenberg written by Cassidy [6]:

The distribution [of the preprint on work made by Heisenberg and Pauli] was set for February 27, 1958. [...]

Three days before the preprint was to be distributed, Heisenberg announced the new formula in a lecture at the University of Göttingen physics institute. ([6] p. 542)

According to the above description, the day of the lecture was 24th local time, which is different from the date of 25th in the Asahi Shimbun. Is this difference because Asahi Shimbun did not correct the time difference for the news distributed by "UP = Kyodo"?

2.4 "The equation of the cosmos" was not a mistranslation

The description in Cassidy's book continues as follows:

An eager reporter in the audience relayed word of a sensational new "world formula" around the world. One enthused press agent proclaimed, "Professor Heisenberg and his assistant, W. Pauli, have discovered the basic equation of the cosmos!" ([6] p. 542)

This reveals that overseas newspapers also used the term "basic equation of the cosmos," and the expression in the Asahi Shimbun was not a mistranslation.

The Asahi Shimbun separately reported the equation later than the news of the lecture at Göttingen University. Sentences that follow in Cassidy's book explain this to some extent:

Two months later, more than 1800 listeners turned out to hear Heisenberg reveal the secret of the cosmos in the same auditorium on the occasion of Max Planck's one-hundredth birthday. During his highly technical talk, Heisenberg carefully wrote his new equation on the overhead projector in the darkened room:

([6] p. 542)

Heisenberg did not reveal the formula in his lecture at the University of Göttingen in February but only its name. He wrote the equation in another occasion mentioned in the above quote. However, the fact that the second lecture was two months later than the first is not consistent with the time when the Asahi Shimbun reported the equation. The second lecture was to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Planck's birth. So, I looked up his birthday and found that it was April 23. [7] This is consistent with the words, "Two months later," in the above quote. However, it is impossible for the Asahi Shimbun dated March 13 to report the lecture contents of April 23. The lecture celebrating 100 years of Planck's birth might have been made about 40 days earlier than his birthday. Despite this, Cassidy might have imagined that the second lecture celebrating Planck's birth should have been around his birthday.

The basic equation of the cosmos quoted here is the same as that in Cassidy's book but copied from a paper co-authored by Heisenberg and young researchers [7]. I will describe later how I learned of this paper.

Polkinghorne describes Heisenberg's speech at the conference in a little more specialized style than Kamefuchi as follows:

[Heisenberg] had conjectured a 'non-linear spinor equation', whose solutions he thought would correspond to the structure of matter as it was then known. Not only was his equation hard to work with, but in the course of the attempt use was made of the dangerous concept of an infinite metric, something which could result in the appearance of unphysical ghosts. ([4] p. 77)

Heisenberg's equation still had problems though he confidently showed it at the University of Göttingen.

Pauli was a collaborator in Heisenberg's research at that time, as mentioned in the first two quotes from Cassidy's book. Why did he take a rebellious attitude at the international conference? I would like to see this point next.

References

4. J. C. Polkinghorne, Rochester Roundabout: The Story of High Energy Physics, (W. H. Freeman, New York, 1989) p. 77.
5. T. Tabata "From Youth Diaries: University Days (5)" (2003), in the Web site IDEA and ISAAC.
6. D. C. Cassidy, Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg (W. H. Freeman, New York, 1991).
7. Max Planck: Biographical in The Nobel Prize, the Web site of the Nobel Foundation.
8. H. P. Dürr, W. Heisenberg, H. Mitter, S. Schlieder, and K. Yamazaki, "Zur Theorie der Elementarteilchen," Z. Naturf. 14a, 441 (1959).

(To be continued)
Search word: Kamefuchi-2020