Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

There is such a joke in Japanese physics circles. Physicist Chaoyong Zhenichiro and Yukawa Hideki are classmates. Compared with such a genius as Yukawa, Zhaoyong Zhenichiro is unknown all the year round and has a very low self-esteem. Ichiro often writes in his diary: I did it today. There has been no progress in scientific research. There are also long paragraphs of self-abasement, and complaining that Yukawa has won the Nobel Prize, and he doesn't even have an article to come up with.

This diary, which was later recognized as inspirational, is basically a collection of low achiever's inferiority complex living in the shadow of talented classmates. In later generations, it is always said that even geniuses like Chaoyong Zhenichiro suffer from inferiority, not to mention ordinary mortals. (PS. In 1965, Chaoyong Zhenichiro and two other physicists won the Nobel Prize in physics. )

What I want to introduce to you today is Hideki Yukawa, a talented scientist worshipped by Chaoyong Zhenichiro.

Hideki Yukawa (1907-1981) Hideki Yukawa (1907-1981) is a famous Japanese physicist. He was born in Tokyo in 1907. Graduated from the Physics Department of Kyoto Imperial University (now Kyoto University).

He received his Doctor of Science degree from Osaka Imperial University (now Osaka University) in 1938.

He has been a professor at Kyoto Imperial University since 1939 and won a gift from the Academy the following year.

He was also a professor at Imperial University of Tokyo (now the University of Tokyo) in 1942 and was awarded the Cultural Medal the following year.

He went to the United States in 1948 and served as a visiting professor at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies, and then as a visiting professor at Columbia University in July of the following year.

In October 1949, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his meson theory. He was the first Japanese to win the Nobel Prize.

Died of illness in Kyoto in 1981.

Hideki Yukawa and Chaoyong Seiichiro

"the way I grew up as a scientist is the same path I have taken as a human being."

Born into a scholar's family, Hideki Yukawa is shy and studious, and has shown his talent in science since childhood. From the age of 50 to 50, he wrote down his childhood and youth, reviewed how he was bound to physics and finally put forward the meson theory.

The Traveler (Japan) by Yukawa Xiushu, translated by Zhou Lindong in the book Traveler, Yukawa describes himself as a traveler and a pioneer in the wilderness. the scenery seen on the road of life and the road of exploration and learning.

In this memoir, Yukawa Hideki does not talk about much profound knowledge of theoretical physics, and he even seldom mentions his academic achievements. He talked eloquently about his hometown, the environment in which he lived and grew up, his relatives and friends in his memory, his childhood, as well as his introverted and sensitive personality and various troubles. He spoke so frankly about what he thought and thought, and unreservedly showed the reader the path of his life.

Hideki Yukawa, who is regarded by the world as a genius, also has depressed times, even pessimistic that he wants to become a monk. Here is a book excerpt from the Traveler, and the life path of scientists is not entirely plain sailing.

In March of the fourth year of Showa (1929), shortly before I graduated from Kyoto University, I began to feel uneasy. If I continue to study theoretical physics, then I may accomplish nothing. I was so pessimistic that I even thought of becoming a monk. The world-weary thought, which has been rooted in my heart since middle school, is on the rise again.

The thought of world-weariness still resides in my heart today, although it is not so much a world-weariness as a seclusion desire. I hope that my contacts with others can be reduced to 1/10. I want to live a quiet life. If no one notices me, it may be a lonely life, but it's not so bad to endure loneliness. Although this wish is a rather unrealistic dream, it gives me comfort.

It may not be so unusual for Hideki Yukawa to have the idea of seclusion when I am about to graduate. There is a temple called Changguang Temple near Osaka City in the eastern district of Osaka. The monk's wife in the temple is my father's cousin. The monk couple have no children, and it is obvious that some of our brothers may pass it on to them in the future. We all avoided the Changguang Temple and said, "if we go there, we will become monks."

Therefore, when I have the idea of seclusion, I think of Changguang Temple and think that they will happily accept me as a monk. I've been thinking like this for four or five days, as if I had a case of measles. After graduation, I completely forgot these thoughts.

The Yucheng research office does not enroll graduate students, so the three of us continue to conduct our research there as unpaid teaching assistants as we did when we were students. At that time, the social economy was in the doldrums, and it was difficult for college graduates to find jobs. As a result, many of my classmates are still in college, and the recession has trained us to become scholars.

My classmates grew their hair one by one. Although some of them had been beautifully parted by the time they graduated, my hair was still cut short. My mother made me a suit, but I seldom wear it. I still wear old student clothes when I go to the lab every day.

Around that time, half of the physics laboratories in Kyoto in the Showa era decided to relocate. Dongda Road Street, then Dongshan Street, had a tram leading to Marutaichi, and it was planned to extend the tram track northward to the present out of Sichuan. In this way, the streetcar will pass right through the west side of the physics lab. Physics professors complain that trams have an impact on galvanometers and that precise experimental measurements cannot be carried out, so the laboratory must be moved to a place more than 100 meters away from the tram line.

For this reason, the proposal to move to the northern campus was approved. However, if the only reason is not to carry out the experiment, then it is only the laboratory that has to be moved out. In fact, due to the budget, the new modern building on the northern campus is not large enough to accommodate all the physics laboratories, so only half of the people in Yucheng have been moved to the new site. Fortunately, those of us who studied quantum physics got a room in the new building and moved out of the old building. I do my research there in a good mood every day.

Looking back on my whole research life, I think I have laid an extremely valuable foundation in the three years after graduating from college. The swimmer who jumped into the water dived for a while-those three years were the preparation period for me. I have two major research projects in front of me. It is not so much a subject as an uncultivated field. The first is the further development of relativistic quantum mechanics. The second is to apply quantum mechanics to nuclear problems. For me, who just graduated from college, these two subjects are too much to expect.

Although I am only 22 years old, I am not too young in age. At that time, most of the physicists who contributed to the development of quantum mechanics were in their 20s, and some were only five or six years older than me. The four most distinguished scientists, Heisenberg, Dirac, Wolfgang Wolfgang Pauli and Enrico Fermi, were all born in 1900-1902, and they all made great achievements at the age of 23 or 24. Both Heisenberg and Dirac visited Japan that autumn. It is a great excitement for me to listen to their speeches.

I have no way to start with the two major problem areas that I have recognized. At that time, the study of nuclei was not the mainstream of physics. Ernest Rutherford (Ernest Rutherford), a man ahead of the times, has repeatedly made remarkable achievements in nuclear physics, but most scientists are hesitant to enter the field. They are only content to study the electrons that revolve around the nucleus inside the atom.

Why don't most physicists study nuclei? One of the main reasons is that the structure of the nucleus is still difficult to grasp. Many scientists believe that matter can eventually be divided into two or three "elementary particles". At that time, only electrons and protons were identified as such particles-no, there was something called "photons", which I will talk about below. However, if all matter were made up of electrons and protons, there would still be great mysteries in the nucleus. From this point of view, it is almost impossible to understand the various properties of the nucleus. Recognizing that this task is impossible, most scientists avoid the nucleus. Some of them vaguely imagine that there is some very unusual behavior of electrons in the nucleus.

Therefore, I think like this: before studying the behavior of electrons in the nucleus, we should first study the interaction between the extranuclear electrons and the nucleus itself as the basis for further research. The method used should be to study the hyperfine structure of atomic spectra. In particular, Dirac's electron theory has achieved extraordinary success outside the nucleus, so it should be applied to the hyperfine structure of hydrogen atomic spectra. This is where my research life began.

A hydrogen atom is made up of an electron and a proton, and electrons and protons are combined by their electrical attraction. In addition, there is a magnetic (though very weak) effect, because protons and electrons are "small magnets". No one has theoretically determined the hyperfine structure caused by these magnetic forces based on Dirac's electronic theory. I want to try it this way, and I find that it can lead to several conclusions. I wrote these results into a detailed report and submitted it to Professor Yucheng, who locked the report in his safe and said he would read it later.

Soon after, a paper on hyperfine structure written by Fermi was published in a professional magazine. I was disappointed because not only did he study the same problem I had begun to study, but he also went one step further than I did. When I encountered such a great disappointment when I was trying to study the nuclear structure, my only thought was to change the problem at least for the time being. Just then, Heisenberg and Pauli's great paper on quantum electrodynamics was published. In some ways, this paper is the final report of quantum theory founded by Planck.

When quantum theory was born, it cast a mysterious shadow over the nature of light. By the end of the 19th century, people had always believed that light was a wave and a form of electromagnetic radiation, which was an indisputable truth. However, quantum theory holds that light must also have the properties of particles. The truth of the concept that light is a collection of photons cannot be denied either. In this way, for at least 20 years, the wave-particle duality of light is a big question mark in the field of physics. With the advent of de Broglie's theory of matter waves, the mystery of duality was extended to matter particles such as electrons.

The mystery of de Broglie wave-particle duality has been partially solved for matter through quantum mechanics. Similarly, in order to finally solve the mystery of the duality of light, quantum mechanics must be used to deal with the electromagnetic field. In this sense, the quantum electrodynamics of Heisenberg and Pauli can be said to be a final statement, which meets the above requirements.

However, there is still a deficit in this final report. The number "infinity", which actually does not exist, has been written into the last line of the final account! This final account of income and expenditure is about energy: in the physical world, which is based on the principle of conservation of energy, the general currency is energy, and its unit is not "yuan", but "erg" or "joule". If the final accounts report does break even, the number "infinity" should not appear in the energy column. How can infinity be removed from the final accounts of Heisenberg and Pauli? This is the new problem in front of us in their paper. I have read their report many times, and every day I think about how I can defeat the demon of infinity. But this demon is much more powerful than I am.

Our research lab is located on the second floor of the new physics building, surrounded by the foundation of the agriculture department of the university. From the south window, you can see a gray building with a Nordic sloping roof. Its walls were covered with ivy; below there were some goats bouncing and playing, sometimes making a strange bleating sound. When I fight the devil of infinite energy every day, the cries of these goats sound like the devil's cold laughter to me.

Every day I overturn the ideas I put forward that day. When I went home to cross the Yachuan River in the evening, I was in a state of despair. Even the Kyoto mountains, which usually comfort me, are sad in the sunset at this time.

The next morning, I felt refreshed when I walked out of the house, but I looked depressed when I came home in the evening. Finally, I gave up the search for the demon and began to think that I should look for an easier problem. While I am wasting my time like this, the scope of application of quantum mechanics is expanding rapidly. Quantum mechanics is succeeding everywhere, from atoms and molecules to chemical bonds and crystal theory. Some new scientific research fields such as solid state theory and quantum chemistry are about to appear. Although I have read a lot and are interested in it, I have no intention of doing that work myself. My eyes are still fixed on uncultivated land such as nuclei and cosmic rays. However, because I don't know where to start, I can only give it up for a while.

At that time, I had a lot of free time, so I decided to learn another language. I don't have any problems with English and German. I learned both at school. As for French, I took night classes in high school, but I often dozed off at night because I was tired during the day. During the lecture, my eyelids were too heavy to open. No matter how hard I try to open it, I can't open my eyes. Over time, my French has not improved, so I can barely read some French books and papers about physics.

I decided to attend a lecture at the Japanese Law Museum in Jiutiaoshan at that time. I go two or three days a week, and on the afternoon of the day of class, I leave the research room early and take the branch line of the city tram from Renwangmen to Guanshang. This line is no longer available today, but at that time, it went east along the edge of the canal, turned south through the zoo, went hand in hand with the sloping railway, and reached the terminal at the same time.

I like to take this streetcar. It's almost always empty. As the terminal approached, the conductor put away his ticket, and when he arrived on the train, he pulled the electric pole of the streetcar to make the tram drive back. I appreciate the atmosphere of freedom. The tram station is near an old power station, and you can see the Kyoto Hotel through the suburban tram line to Otsu. I walked for a while along the tram line to Otsu, flanked by hills, the road was very narrow, and then entered the ramp on the left. The Japanese Dharma Museum is halfway up the nine mountains, from which you can get a panoramic view of the capital. The atmosphere here is so different from that of the physics lab that I really like it.

The stills of the movie "under the Roof of Paris" was when French films began to become popular in Japan, and the first film was "under the Roof of Paris". I no longer felt guilty about walking into the cinema in Xinjingji, so I also went to see the film. "memories. "this theme song was popular on the streets of Kyoto, and I also learned the French lyrics:" when she was 20 years old. "

The Japanese Law Museum is in line with my imagination of France and Paris at that time. There were beautiful woods around the school, and people gathered there-all of which created an atmosphere that was completely different from any environment I had known before. People are young, and many speak French very well. Their clothes and manners are elegant, especially among women, who are usually young ladies and young women in Kyoto and Hanshin.

On the other hand, I wear a college uniform and have short hair. I hardly ever talked to anyone there. I looked like a man from another world. I showed up there by accident. During the recess, I silently overlooked the city view of Kyoto. I have nothing else to do, but I don't feel unhappy when I come here.

There is a French female teacher who seems to be emotional and kind to others. I feel very happy to listen to her class. Once, the teacher asked us to write a French composition entitled "Walking". I wrote this article in French:

I don't want to seek the strong excitement of the city. I am too lazy to travel far from the countryside. My home is near the palace. I often take a walk in the palace garden. Autumn is the best time. The fallen leaves on the path among the ancient trees of the palace made a slight noise under my clogs, which remained in my heart like an unforgettable echo.

There is a big square in the palace, and groups of children occupy several corners to play baseball on Sunday. Under a big tree in the middle of the square, a young man on duty stopped his bike to watch.

It is usually very quiet here, and we can often see young mothers pushing strollers. There are two ginkgo trees on the lawn. In autumn, the ground is covered with their yellow fallen leaves. On a sunny morning, I saw two little boys under the tree sprinkling fallen leaves on each other's heads. A puppy ran over and played with them on the field covered with yellow leaves. Looking up above them, I saw a lonely ginkgo branch with no leaves, shining pink in the sun.

I always go out of the house to think about a problem, but my attention is attracted by the things around me. I forget everything else. I walk home easily and happily.

In fact, I am a lonely walker. But my new idea came out of a walk. Because I am not talkative by nature, I usually sit in the research room reading magazines all day without talking to anyone. I must look unfriendly and unhappy in the eyes of my friends. I am not satisfied with my behavior, but I find it difficult to change. I decided that not only am I unhappy, but also I can't make others happy, so I think I should be lonely all my life. I'd better not get married (I think so), because then I will completely lose my own freedom and cannot make my wife happy.

When I am tired of doing research, I often draw blueprints of the room where I live alone. I still have such a design on hand: in a room of about 15 square meters, there is a chair, a bookshelf and a bed. Although it is ridiculous that there is no room for anything other than books, it is amazing that there is still a place to take a bath. This is the fairy tale world where I live. No, it is too unimaginative, too dry, too close to reality, so that it can not be called a fairy tale world. I haven't taken off the temperament of a child who likes to play with bonsai.

The window of my little world opens to the courtyard of science, but there is enough light coming in from this window. In fact, Professor Kimura invited many scientists as temporary speakers from outside the school, which provided a great excitement. In the more than two years since I graduated from university, Dr. Huang Sheng, Dr. Sugura Meisheng, Dr. Yoshio Inko and others have given lectures on quantum mechanics from different angles. All of them have studied new physics in Europe, especially the professors of benevolence have the greatest influence on us.

At that time, the word "spirit of Copenhagen" was often heard in the field of physics, which refers to the Institute of theoretical Physics of the University of Copenhagen with Niels Bohr as its director. Excellent theoretical physicists from all over the world admire Dr. Bohr and gather there, including some Japanese scientists. Yoshio Inko stayed in Copenhagen for a long time. His speech not only explained quantum physics, because he brought us the "spirit of Copenhagen", the collective spirit of the best theoretical physicists of the time centered on Niels Bohr.

If I were to describe the spirit of Copenhagen, I would not be able to sum it up in a few words. However, it certainly has something to do with the spirit of tolerance. I am educated in liberalism, so this is particularly attractive to me, but the professor of Renke himself is also attractive to me. I can talk to him smoothly, although I am usually very silent. I may have seen in Renke the kind of "fatherly" image that I could not see in my father. In short, my lonely heart, my closed heart. Began to open it in front of professor Renke.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: non-fictional time (ID:non-fiction702), by Hideki Yukawa

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