Yukawa published these observations in his first original paper in 1935 in Proceedings of the PMSJ (Physico-Mathematical Society of Japan). Although it was written in English, the paper was ignored for two years. Yukawa had been bold in predicting a new particle—thereby defying Occam’s razor, the principle that explanatory entities should not proliferate unnecessarily. In 1937 Carl D. Anderson and Seth H. Neddermeyer of the California Institute of Technology discovered, in traces left by cosmic rays, charged particles that had about the right mass to meet the requirements of Yukawa’s theory. But the cosmic-ray particle appeared at sea level instead of being absorbed high up in the atmosphere, so it lived 100 times longer than Yukawa had predicted.
Tomonaga, meanwhile, was working with Nishina on quantum electrodynamics. In 1937 he visited Heisenberg at Leipzig University, collaborating with him for two years on theories of nuclear forces. Yukawa also arrived, en route to the prestigious Solvay Congress in Brussels. But the conference was canceled, and the two men had to leave Europe hurriedly.
War brought the golden age of quantum physics to an abrupt end. The founders of the new physics, until then concentrated in European centers such as Göttingen in Germany, scattered, ending up mainly in the U.S. Heisenberg, left virtually alone in Germany, continued at least initially to work on field theory—a generalization of quantum electrodynamics—and to correspond with Tomonaga.
A War Like No Other
By 1941, when Japan entered the world war, Yukawa had become a professor at Kyoto. His students and collaborators included two radicals, Shoichi Sakata and Mitsuo Taketani. At the time, Marxist philosophy was influential among intellectuals, who saw it as an antidote to the militarism of the imperial government. Unfortunately, Taketani’s writings for the Marxist journal Sekai Bunka (World Culture) had drawn the attention of the thought police. He had been jailed for six months in 1938, then released into Yukawa’s custody thanks to the intervention of Nishina. Although Yukawa remained totally wrapped up in physics and expressed no political views at all, he continued to shelter the radicals in his lab.
Sakata and Taketani developed a Marxist philosophy of science called the three-stages theory. Suppose a researcher discovers a new, inexplicable phenomenon. First he or she learns the details and tries to discern regularities. Next the scientist comes up with a qualitative model to explain the patterns and finally develops a precise mathematical theory that subsumes the model. But another discovery soon forces the process to repeat. As a result, the history of science resembles a spiral, going around in circles yet always advancing. This philosophy came to influence many of the younger physicists, including one of us (Nambu).
Meanwhile, as war raged in the Pacific, the researchers continued to work on physics. In 1942 Sakata and Takeshi Inoue suggested that Anderson and Neddermeyer had not seen Yukawa’s particle but instead had seen a lighter object, now called a muon, which came from the decay of the true Yukawa particle, the pion. They described their theory to the Meson Club, an informal group that met regularly to discuss physics, and published it in a Japanese journal.
Yukawa was doing war work one day a week; he never said what this entailed. (He did say that he would read the Tale of Genji while commuting to the military lab.) Tomonaga, who had become a professor at the Tokyo Bunrika University (now called the University of Tsukuba), was more involved in the war effort. Together with Masao Kotani of the University of Tokyo, he developed a theory of magnetrons—devices used in radar systems for generating electromagnetic waves—for the navy. Through the hands of a submarine captain he knew, Heisenberg sent Tomonaga a paper on a technique he had invented for describing the interactions of quantum particles. It was in essence a theory of waves, which Tomonaga soon applied to designing radar waveguides.
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