At about the time the Lamb shift was reported, a group in England discovered the decay of the pion to the muon in photographic plates exposed to cosmic rays at high altitude. The finding proved Inoue, Sakata and Yukawa to have been spectacularly correct. After the dust settled, it became clear that Yukawa had discovered a deep rule about forces: they are transmitted by particles whose spin is always an integer and whose mass determines their range. Moreover, his tactic of postulating a new particle turned out to be astoundingly successful. The 20th century saw the discovery of an abundance of subatomic particles, many of which were predicted years before.
In 1947 new particles began to show up that were so puzzling that they were dubbed “strange.” Although they appeared rarely, they often did so in pairs and, moreover, lived anomalously long. Eventually Murray Gell-Mann of the California Institute of Technology and, independently, Kazuhiko Nishijima of Osaka City University and other Japanese researchers discovered a regularity behind their properties, described by a quantum characteristic called “strangeness.” (Discerning this pattern was the first step in the three-stages theory.)
In subsequent years Sakata and his associates became active in sorting through the abundance of particles that were turning up and postulated a mathematical framework, or triad, that became the forerunner of the quark model. (This framework formed the second stage. At present, high-energy physics, with its precise theory of particles and forces known as the Standard Model, is in the third and final stage.)
Meanwhile physicists in Japan were renewing ties with those in the U.S. who had made the atomic bomb. Their feelings toward the Americans were ambiguous. The carpet bombings of Tokyo and the holocausts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been shocking even for those Japanese who had opposed the war. On the other hand, the occupation, with its program of liberalization, was relatively benevolent. Perhaps the deciding factor was their shared fascination for science.
Reconciliation
Dyson has described how, in 1948, Bethe received the first two issues of Progress of Theoretical Physics, printed on rough, brownish paper. An article in the second issue by Tomonaga contained the central idea of Schwinger’s theory. “Somehow or other, amid the ruin and turmoil of the war, Tomonaga had maintained in Japan a school of research in theoretical physics that was in some respects ahead of anything existing elsewhere at that time,” Dyson wrote. “He had pushed on alone and laid the foundations of the new quantum electrodynamics, five years before Schwinger and without any help from the Columbia experiments. It came to us as a voice out of the deep.” J. Robert Oppenheimer, then director of the Institute for Advanced Study, invited Yukawa to visit. He spent a year there, another at Columbia, and received the Nobel Prize in 1949. Tomonaga also visited the institute and found it extremely stimulating. But he was homesick. “I feel as if I am exiled in paradise,” he wrote to his former students. He returned after a year to Japan, having worked on a theory of particles moving in one dimension that is currently proving useful to string theorists.
From the early 1950s, younger physicists also began to visit the U.S. Some, such as Nambu, stayed on. To an extent mitigating this brain drain, the expatriates retained ties with their colleagues in Japan. One means was to send letters to an informal newsletter, Soryushiron Kenkyu, which was often read aloud during meetings of a research group that succeeded the Meson Club. In 1953 Yukawa became the director of a new research institute at Kyoto, now known as the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics.
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