Mystery of the Dream and the Memory

"The Theory of Atomic Spectra" by E. U. Condon & George H. Shortley, taken from the Web site of Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Theory-Atomic-Spectra-U-Condon/dp/0521092094/)

The memory about the book I hadn't remembered for decades suddenly appeared in my dream the night before last as the names of two co-authors, "Condon–Shortley." Even after waking up, I couldn't remember its title but thought it was probably a book about condensed matter physics. Searching the authors' names on the Internet, I found it to be a masterpiece, "The Theory of Atomic Spectra," published in 1935 [Note 1]. We can divide physics into two subfields: physics on condensed matter and that on particles and nuclei. Physics on atomic spectra belongs to the former. So, my thought was correct.

My university student days were soon after World War II and in a period of confusion, and many pirated editions of masterpieces about various topics in physics appeared in Japan. An upper-year student with a part-time job related to pirated edition publishers would often come to our classroom to advertise those editions. Once, he might have said about the bootleg version of this book, "Condon–Shortley is coming out. It's a classic book on the theory of atomic spectra." During a lecture on atomic spectra, the teacher might have said, "You can learn more about this in Condon–Shortley book." Further, I may have heard one of my classmates say, "I'm not sure if I should buy Condon–Shortley."

I majored in "atomic nuclei" and had no interest in "atomic spectra." So, I have neither wanted to read that book nor remembered it for more than 65 years after graduation. Nonetheless, I recalled the authors' names in a dream. Such is an extremely curious and mysterious phenomenon.

Notes

1. On the publisher's website, it reads: When first published, a reviewer in Nature said that 'Its power and thoroughness leave the general impression of a work of the first rank, which successfully unifies the existing state of our knowledge, and will prove for many years a starting point for further researches and an inspiration to those who may undertake them.'
   (https://www.cambridge.org/jp/academic/subjects/physics/atomic-physics-molecular-physics-and-chemical-physics/theory-atomic-spectra)

Yukawa's Utushi-e

When I read the English translation, by L. Brown and R. Yoshida, of Yukawa's autobiographical book Tabibito, I found many errors and sent a list of corrections to Brown. The list included shadow pictures as the translation of "うつしえ (utsushi-e)." Yukawa mentioned it together with ground-cherries and Kintaro wheat-gluten bars, etc. as things sold at street-stalls at a fair in his childhood. Utsushi-e meant both shadow pictures (写し絵) and transfer pictures (移し絵), but shadow pictures are played rather than sold. So, I thought the correct translation of utsushi-e should be transfer pictures but was not confident about this. In my childhood transfer pictures were surely popular among children. In the days when Yukawa was a child, however, sheets for shadow pictures (the equivalent to slides of the present days) might have been sold, and they might have enjoyed a picture show by passing lamplight through them. (This story was given in Part I, Chapter 1, of my book Passage through Spacetime.)

Recently I read Soseki's autobiographical novel Michikusa and found the following passage:

Of course, he was able to get whatever toys he wanted. Tools for utsushi-e (写し絵) were also included in it.

In Notes section at the end of Michikusa, the following description is given about utsushi-e:

The thing that reflects pictures drawn on glass onto a screen made of cloth or paper, in the dark; a magic lantern.

These indicate that the shadow picture was one of popular toys in Meiji period, to which childhood days of both Soseki and Yukawa belonged. Soseki was born in 1867; Yukawa, in 1907; and I in 1935. As for the year of birth, therefore, Yukawa and I are closer than Soseki and Yukawa. However, there was a big change of cultural environments when electric lights spread through the country [an almost full spread in Tokyo was achieved in 1912 (Ref. 1)]. In my childhood, I saw a projector of 8-mm film in a nearby home already being used instead of a magic lantern. Thus, Soseki and Yukawa had much in common in their childhood, and I have to admit that the translation, "shadow pictures," by Brown and Yoshida was quite right.

Reference

1. Chronology of electricity from Taisho to Showa, A Web page of the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan.

Factors to Make Sequels Excellent

A friend of mine M.C. in Sweden wrote on her Facebook page that she had gotten an assignment from her teacher of an English class to write a parallel story in which one of the characters in a book, of her choice from a list, does something entirely different. This reminded me of writing a sequel to another person's title. Though the sequel is different from the parallel story, this reminding happened for the following reasons: (1) Both the sequel and the parallel story use at least one of the characters in an original book. (2) Two years ago, I gave M.C. my used book Zoku-Meian (続明暗) written by Minae Mizumura, which is a sequel to Natsume Sōseki's work Meian. (3) Just a few days ago, I browsed the article entitled "To be continued: The art of the sequel" (written by Andrew Motion) in the "Sunday Book Review" section (dated August 19, 2012) of The New York Times.

What does Motion's article say about excellent sequels? The summary of the article on the index page of "Sunday Book Review" reads as follows: 'The best sequels enrich and extend the original story, but they do not treat it as an unfinished work that needs completion.' At first glance, I did not fully understand the meaning of the latter half of this summary. However, the sentences of the article related to this part of the summary were more understandable, though they repeatedly used the word "they" to mean different things: '… best sequels do not intend to "finish" whatever stories they [best sequels] tackle because they [the authors of best sequels] think they [the original stories] are somehow incomplete. They [best sequels] are instead based on the assumption that no story is ever finished — and present themselves as a chunk of life, not as complete and rounded histories.' (Words in [ ] are my interpretation.)

I found Zoku-Meian quite an enjoyable sequel. Did it not intend to complete Sōseki's original work? I think that it did. It had a final scene, in which the main character felt something like a revelation (if my memory was correct). This scene gave me an impression of being a little out of place, because it was not like the one written by Sōseki but by some other author, for example, Saneatsu Mushanokōji, in spite of Mizumura's effort to write in a style as close as Sōseki's (though, according to a review, found on the Internet, of Zoku-Meian, Mizumura wrote in the afterwords of the book that such had not been her main goal).

On the other hand, the style of Mizumura's sentences in the sequel was much like those of Sōseki's original, which had been written more than seventy years before when cultural environment and the use of Japanese words were rather different from the present day. What interested me most seems to have been this aspect of the sequel by Mizumura. Thus, masterful imitation of the literary style of the original author seems to me to be another significant, independent factor to make a sequel excellent.

A Mathematician's Unique Autobiography

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 Princeton University, Harvard University, and the University of California on Japanese language and Japanese literature; and now lives in Kobe after becoming Professor Emerita at the final workplace. She got a copy of Shimura's book in California from a 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 had the following thought: His name is probably related to Fermat's last theorem. I possessed 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, and his observations are unique. Some anecdotes of luminaries are also included. Mathematically-minded people should not expect to learn about algebraic geometry or such from this book. However, he depicts a rough outline of his research and what is valuable in the investigation of mathematics as well as memories of Taniyama, who contributed to finding Taniyama-Shimura conjecture (now called modularity theorem, which had a crucial role in the proof of Fermat's last theorem accomplished by Andrew Wiles). Therefore, those people, as mentioned above, would also be able to enjoy this book.

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 a nostalgic feeling, I thought that he also did an excellent job here. He quotes from one of the light kinds of music "that were not so objectionable": "La, la, la, red flowers carried on a wagon, / Spring has come from the village to the town, / ..." (a skillful 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 asked me to visit her someday. 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. He confuses the Marxism with the 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 and his determination to continue working on mathematics till old ages.

As for the work of mathematics, many mathematicians think, "The more difficult, the better." Shimura's view is different from this. 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 Yoshihiro Matsumori for our conversation on the message page of Facebook, which became the motive of writing this blog post.

(Modified May 16, 2019)

Fumiko Yonezawa Reviews the Japanese Edition of The Strangest Man

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.

New Books on Atomic Bombs

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

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