Got a Good Message

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.

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

Joseph Rotblat, 1908–2005

On August 31, 2005, the physicist Joseph Rotblat, one of the founders of the Pugwash peace movement in 1957, passed away. Rotblat and Pugwash shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 "for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms" [1]. I received four e-mail messages about the passing of Rotblat.

The first e-mail message I received was from Tatsujiro Suzuki, the organizer of Peace Pledge Japan (PPJ) [2], to all the signers of the pledge advocated by PPJ. He wrote about these facts: Rotblat joined the Manhattan Project, but learning the impossibility of Germany's making an atomic bomb, he resigned from the Project. Rotblat gave warm encouragement to PPJ. Suzuki's message also included copies of articles published in the Yomiuri and the Mainichi both reporting the death of Rotblat.

The second was a message addressed to David Bradley from an American friend of mine John Hubble. The latter kindly forwarded it to some of his friends including me. John was a former president of the International Radiation Physics Society (IRPS), and asks Bradley to write an obituary in the next issue of the IRPS Bulletin, describing Rotblat's contribution to IRPS Meetings in 1982 and 1985.

The third was an e-mail notification of the PhysicsWeb news published by the Institute of Physics. From the piece of news on the death of Rotblat [2], I learned that in 1950 he had established a new career for himself as a medical physicist, that he had been professor of physics at Bartholomew's Hospital in London from 1950 until his retirement in 1976 and that he had also served as editor of the journal Physics in Medicine and Biology. I was also a little interested in medical physics. However, it was after the middle of the 1980th, and I did not know such a career of Rotblat.

The fourth was a reply message sent to John and all the addressees in the "Cc" line of his message, from Prof. Mohamed Ahmed Gomaa in Cairo, Egypt. This message tells us the followings: Gomaa attended the postgraduate course at London University from 1964 to 1965. Rotblat was an External examiner for his Ph D in 1967. He studied Evans's textbook, The Atomic Nucleus [4], for years together with other students under Rotblat's guidance. — It was nice to hear about Evans's book; I also studied part of it. I have a copy of a reprint edition of this book made in India in 1967. I remember this: When I got that copy, there were some dead bodies of tiny insects among its pages. This seems to represent the condition of printing offices in India those days. —

I heartily wish that Rotblat's final aim of eliminating nuclear arms from the world be realized as soon as possible.

References

1. The Nobel Peace Prize 1995, Nobelprize.org (1995).
2. Peace Pledge (Note added later: Link aborted).
3. Joseph Rotblat dies, PhysicsWeb News (September 2, 2005).
4. R. D. Evans, The Atomic Nucleus, Reprint edition (Krieger Publishing, 1982; originally published by McGrow-Hill in 1955).

References added later

• J. P. Holdren, Joseph Rotblat (1908–2005), Science Vol. 310, p. 633 (2005).
• F. Calogero and R. Hinde, Joseph Rotblat, Physics Today. Vol. 59, No. 4, p. 85 (2006).
• M. Underwood, Joseph Rotblat: A Man of Conscience in the Nuclear Age (Sussex Academic Press, 2009).
• A. Brown, Keeper of the Nuclear Conscience: The Life and Work of Joseph Rotblat (Oxford University Press, to be published April 1, 2012).

"He Wants to Dazzle Voters"

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

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

Former Army Nurse's Story

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

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

1. M. Feynman, ed. with an introduction, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman (Basic Books, 2005).
2. P. Galison, "Letters from a hero: What made Richard Feynman so much more than a Nobel prizewinning physicist?" Nature, Vol. 436, p. 320 (2005).
3. 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).
4. R. P. Feynman, R. B. Leighton and M. Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics (Addison Wesley, 1963).