Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [155]
Japan’s physicists had just begun making significant contributions to the international community in the 1930s—it had been Hideki Yukawa at Kyōto University who first proposed that a massive, short-lived, undiscovered particle might act as a “carrier” of the nuclear force, binding protons together in the atom’s core—when the war isolated them utterly. Even with the war’s end, channels to occupied Japan opened slowly. News of the Lamb shift reached Kyōto and Tokyo not through American physicists and not through journals, but from a squib in a newsmagazine.
Tomonaga, a native of Tokyo and a graduate of Kyōto University, a classmate and friend of Yukawa, had been deeply influenced by Dirac; he belonged to a small group that translated Dirac’s famous textbook into Japanese. In 1937 he traveled to Germany to study with Heisenberg; returning at the war’s onset in 1939, he stopped briefly in New York to visit the World’s Fair. He worked out what he called a “super many time” theory, in which every point in the field had its own clock—a workable notion, he found, despite the seeming absurdity of trying to manipulate infinitely many time variables. In his thoughts on physics he traversed much of the ground covered by his European and American counterparts, but with a far greater sense of solitude, hardly diminished by his time in Germany. He recorded a dark mood in his diary from time to time:
After supper I took up my physics again, but at last I gave up. Ill-starred work indeed! … Recently I have felt very sad without any reason, so I went to a film… . Returning home I read a book on physics. I don’t understand it very well… . Why isn’t nature clearer and more directly comprehensible? … As I went on with the calculation, I found the integral diverged—was infinite. After lunch I went for a walk. The air was astringently cold… . All of us stand on the dividing line from which the future is invisible. We need not be too anxious about the results, even though they may turn out quite different from what you expect… .
His occasional emotional desolation paled in light of what faced him in the months after the surrender, when shortages of food and housing overshadowed all else in Japan. He made a home and an office in a battered Quonset hut on the Tokyo University grounds. He furnished it with mats.
Although Oppenheimer knew nothing of Tomonaga’s personal circumstances, he knew what he and his Los Alamos compatriots had wrought on Japan, and he also wished to preserve the internationalism of physics in the face of what suddenly seemed an American hegemony. He could hardly have been better placed to appreciate Tomonaga’s letter—clear evidence that a Japanese physicist had not just matched the essentials of Schwinger’s work but had anticipated it. Tomonaga had not published, and he had not created the entire Schwingerian tapestry, but he had been first. Oppenheimer immediately gave Tomonaga his imprimatur in a letter to each of the Pocono participants. “Just because we were able to hear Schwinger’s beautiful report,” he wrote, “we may better be able to appreciate this independent development.” For Dyson, working in Pocono’s aftermath to understand the new theories, the revelation of Tomonaga’s papers lay in what seemed a simple beauty. He thought that he now understood Schwinger and that not all Schwinger’s complications were necessary. Graduate students poring over the Pocono notes already suspected this, despite the acclaim their elders were awarding. Later Dyson quoted “an unkind critic” as having said, “Other people publish to show how to do it, but Julian Schwinger publishes to show you that only he can do it.” He seemed to strive for an exceptional ratio of equations to text, and the prose posed serious challenges to the Physical Review’s typesetters.
Schwinger occasionally