Biographies

Professor Takeshi Onodera of Nihon University quotes the following passage in the column "Words to Remember" of Asahi Weekly [1].

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

--Thomas Carlyle, "Heroes and Hero-Worship"

Onodera recollects that his father often had bought him the biography of a great person in his childhood, and writes that in post-war Japan the concept of "great persons" has become unpopular. This trend is based on the thought that distinction is incompatible with the principle of equality. Thus the people of the post-war generation might have been obliged to succeed under the pretence of disliking success and must have felt guilty about the result. Onodera considers such situation as desolate and laments it, commenting that without longing and an ideal one would be apt to lose interest in living.

When I was a high school junior, one of my teachers asked me about my hobby. I said, "I like to read denki." Denki is the Japanese word for biographies. The teacher said, "Do you mean 'books on denki'?" The word denki also means electricity. "No, I don't. I read 'ijin no denki' (biographical books of great persons)." I have kept this hobby of reading biographies until now, though the field of great persons I am interested in has been narrowed down to science (mainly physics).

Since the years of rising yen in the 1980s, I have collected many biographies of great physicists written in English. My collection well covers the lists of the top ten physicists in history chosen by PhysicsWeb and Physics World surveys (see the previous section) except James Clerk Maxwell. What now I want is an enough time to enjoy those biographies.

In the middle of writing this essay, I received the 6-Dec-1999 issue of "Movable Type," a free e-mail announcement from Britannica.com, which included the following notification of the biographical-book page at Britannica.com's website:

From historical overviews to psychological profiles, biographies are perennial favorites among book lovers. Celebrate the lives of poets, artists, and politicians this week in Books.

Let us celebrate the lives of physicists too to gain much interest in living (a list of my collection of biographies of physicists will appear later in this website). However, be aware also of the following dangerous nature of a biography:

Whoever undertakes to write a biography binds himself to lying, to concealment, to flummery, and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, since biographical material is not to be had, and if it were it could not be used. Truth is not accessible; mankind does not deserve it.

--Sigmund Freud, in a letter to a friend
[Quoted in the aforementioned issue of "Movable Type"
from: George Seldes, ed., "The Great Thoughts"]

1. Asahi Weekly, Vol. 27, No. 46 (Nov. 21, 1999).

The Top Ten Physicists

The top-ten physicists in history according to two polls have been announced. Can you guess the names in the lists? Is Richard Feynman in the lists? If so, what is his ranking?

One of the polls was conducted by Physics World magazine, published by the Institute of Physics (IOP), the British professional organization of physicists celebrating its 125th anniversary this year [1]. The other was made by PhysicsWeb, also published by IOP on the web [2]. We can extract another top-ten list from John Simmons' book [3], which gives a ranking of 100 most influential scientists from the past to the present.

The three lists are combined in the table below.

Ranking	PhysicsWeb survey	Physics World survey	Simmons
1	Isaac Newton	Albert Einstein	Isaac Newton
2	Albert Einstein	Isaac Newton	Albert Einstein
3	James Clerk Maxwell	James Clerk Maxwell	Niels Bohr
4	Galileo Galilei	Niels Bohr	Galileo Galilei
5	Paul Dirac	Werner Heisenberg	Johannes Kepler
6	Niels Bohr	Galileo Galilei	Nicolaus Copernicus
7	Max Planck	Richard Feynman	Michael Faraday
8	Richard Feynman	Paul Dirac Erwin Schrödinger	James Clerk Maxwell
9	Michael Faraday		Werner Heisenberg
10	Erwin Schrödinger	Ernest Rutherford	Erwin Schrödinger

Six physicists are present in all the three lists: Newton, Einstein, Maxwell, Galilei, Bohr and Schrödinger. Four physicists appear twice: Dirac, Feynman, Faraday and Heisenberg. Planck, Rutherford, Kepler and Copernicus are found in a single list. Among the physicists of the 20th century, the number of theorists is overwhelmingly larger than that of experimentalist.

PhysicsWeb also gives the names that followed the top ten. Among those, the names not included in the other top ten lists either are: Ludwig Boltzmann, Enrico Fermi, Archimedes, Stephen Hawking, Lev Landau, J. J. Thomson, Marie Curie, Lord Rayleigh, Aristotle, Wolfgang Pauli, John Bardean, Edwin Hubble, Charles Townes and Abdus Salam.

In the ranking chosen by Simmons from all the fields of science, Schrödinger, 10th among physicists, is 18th, and Feynman comes at the 52nd. It is to be noted that all these lists are biased to the Western world, though it is true that there are not much candidates in the Eastern world.

Girls and boys, be ambitious to place your own name in such a list in the next century!

1. Physics World, December issue (1999); cited by Physics News Update, No. 459 (1999).
2. PhysicsWeb News, November issue (1999).
3. J. Simmons, "The Scientific 100" (Carol Publishing Group, 1996).

Read essays related to Richard Feynman: "What Do I Care What Mr. Feynman Thinks?"

Effects of Tokai Accident

As already written in an earlier story of Femto-Essays, the accident that happened at a nuclear-fuel processing plant in Tokai, Japan, on 30 September 1999 is the worst in recent years. On 4 November 1999, the Science and Technology Agency of the Japanese government announced the estimated exposure dose. During about 20 hours of overcriticality, a person could have been exposed to the dose of 150 mSv at the boundary of the plant, which was about 80 m from the chain-reaction site. An evacuation order had been given to the residents within the distance of 350 m from the site, but the results of estimation indicated that the persons outside the evacuation area might have been exposed to the dose above the annual dose limit of 1 mSv (Asahi-Shimbun).

An article in the "Opinion" column of Nature took up this accident [1]. The author of the editorial writes that the responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of the government. This is the same opinion as I wrote in the earlier essay. The author says further that the problem of the effectiveness of safety regulation in Japan is not confined to nuclear power, and refers to deficiencies in Japan's regulation of the pharmaceutical industry, commenting on the inability of the Japanese government to set up competent regulatory bodies and the possible continuation of the problem in the future. This is a keen observation similar to the one that might be made by some of Japan's nongovernment parties.

In the concluding paragraph of the editorial, it is written that this is bad news for the world's nuclear industry. The reason given is that despite calls in some circles for its greater use to curb carbon dioxide emissions, the nuclear power generation, expected to expand significantly only in Asia, would meet with more fierce opposition for many years to come. Why does the author (as well as the people of "some circles" mentioned above, possibly) consider that the use of nuclear power should expand only in Asia? The reasons might be: The movement of opposition to nuclear power is weaker in Asia than other areas of the world, and presently the ratio of electricity supplied by nuclear power reactors to the total power generated is rather low in Asia.

In the mother country of Nature, England, electricity supplied by nuclear power reactors in 1998 is 27% of the total power, and no reactors are under construction. This situation falls much behind (or, from the viewpoint of opponents of nuclear power, is much advanced than) that of Japan, where the fractional power of 36% is already generated by nuclear reactors, and two more reactors are under construction [2]. Therefore, people of England also have to make a great effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by some method.

1. "Perils of inadequacies in safety regulation," Nature, Vol. 401, p. 513 (1999).
2. "Table of Reactors" IAEA Press Release, 29 April (1999).

Further Reading

• "Report on the preliminary fact finding mission following the accident at the nuclear fuel processing facility in Tokaimura, Japan," IAEA (1999) 35 pp.

Notes Added Later:

1. I have learnt that England has the advantage of having much natural gas resource in suppressing nuclear power.
2. On 11 December 1999, the Ministry of Science and Technology announced the results of re-evaluation of the doses the persons around the site of the JCO accident might have been exposed. The revised doses were lower by about 40% than the original estimates.
3. Hisashi Ouchi, the worker of JCO who was exposed to the highest dose of radiation, died on 21 Dec 1999, the 83rd day since the accident. The dose he was exposed to was estimated to be from 16 to 20 Sv by the National Institute of Radiological Sciences (Asahi-shimbun, 22 Dec 1999).

Assessment of Producing Mini Black Holes

The construction of a machine for the physics experiment was completed at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) at the beginning of November 1999. The machine is called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC, pronounced "Rick"), and its purpose is to create the stuff that has not existed since the early universe (quark-gluon plasmas). An article on this machine and related physics has been published in the March 1999 issue of Scientific American [1]. Sending letters to the editors of this journal, some readers expressed worries about the possibility of catastrophic results by the production of unknown matter and miniature black holes. Two of the letters were printed in the July 1999 issue together with the reply from the physicist Frank Wilczek of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N. J. His conclusion was that a doomsday scenario was not plausible [2].

A committee of distinguished physicists convened by BNL Director John Marburger gave a more complete answer to this Sci-Fi like problem recently. The speculative disaster scenarios considered were:

• Creation of a black hole that would "eat" ordinary matter.
• Initiation of a transition to a new, more stable universe.
• Formation of a "strangelet" that would convert ordinary matter to a new form.

The committee concluded that there were no credible mechanisms for catastrophic scenarios at RHIC. A summary of the committee report can be viewed at a website [3]. BNL Director Marburger said [4], "Nature has been creating collisions of energies comparable to those at RHIC for billions of years, and there is no evidence of any kind of disaster related to those collisions. RHIC does not take us beyond the limits of natural phenomena. It brings a rare phenomenon into the view of our instruments so we can puzzle out its inner workings."

The fact that a comprehensive assessment has been made of the very speculative "disaster" is to be welcomed. However, we should worry about that the assessment of more probable danger is sometimes incomplete in a certain country.

1. M. Mukerjee, Sci. Amer. 280 (3), 42 (1999).
2. F. Wilczek, Sci. Amer. 281 (1), 5 (1999).
3. Brookhaven Natl. Lab., Committee Report on Speculative "Disaster Scenarios" at RHIC (1999).
4. Brookhaven Natl. Lab. News Release (Oct. 6, 1999).

Energy and Environment

On October 25, 1999, Peter E. Hodgson delivered a lecture entitled "Global Warming, the Energy Crisis and Nuclear Power" at a meeting sponsored by Osaka Nuclear Science Association and held at Osaka Science and Technology Center. I had an honor to be the chairperson of the lecture. Hodgson is Professor of theoretical nuclear physics at University of Oxford, and has been the member of the Atomic Scientists' Association for many years. He has written a number of books on nuclear physics as well as on the relation of nuclear physics and society [1].

He talked about the comparison of possible energy sources of the future by the five criteria of capacity, cost, reliability, safety and environment, quoting the following words of William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and showing numerical data collected as much as possible.

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.

The possible energy sources considered included coal, oil, gas, wind, solar, hydroelectric, tidal and nuclear power plants. The data presented showed that nuclear power was most promising in every respect. His calm and gentle manner of talking did not weaken his conclusion but strengthened it. The audience consisted mostly of nuclear and radiation scientists. At this time of intensifying mood of public opposition against nuclear power due to the Tokai accident, therefore, Hodgson's lecture must have given encouragement to most of the attendants.

The opponents of nuclear power should also discuss the matter scientifically on the basis of numerical data related to the scope of a wide range, if they wish to stand firmly against proponents. Hodgson writes in his paper [2], on which a large part of his lecture was based, "The onus of demonstrating a better way to combat global warming lies on the opponents of nuclear power."

1. The latest of the latter kind of books is: Peter E. Hodgson, Nuclear Power, Energy and the Environment (Imperial College Press, 1999).
2. P. E. Hodgson, Nuclear Energy, Vol. 38, No. 3, 147 (1999).

Related Site

• H. H. Rogner and A. Khan, "Comparing Energy Options", IAEA Bulletin Vol. 40, No. 1 (1998).

Further Reading Added Later

1. H. Herzog, B. Eliasson and O. Kaarstad, "Capturing Greenhouse Gases," Scientific American Vol. 282, No. 2, pp. 54-61 (2000). The authors review the approach of burning fossil fuels without releasing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by separating them underground or in the deep ocean.
2. W. C. Sailor, D. Bodansky, C. Braun, S. Fetter and B. van der Zwaan, "A Nuclear Solution to Climate Change?" Science, Vol. 288, pp. 1177-1178 (2000).