IDEA & ISAAC: Surely I'm Joking!

"Group Therapy for Particle Physics"

2012-01-28T13:58:00.000+09:00

Peter Woit at Columbia University is known for his criticisms of string theory in his book Not Even Wrong [1] and writes essays at the blog site of the same name. One of his latest blog post was entitled "An Introduction to Group Therapy for Particle Physics" [2]. The title comes from the subtitle of one of the books reviewed in the latest CERN Courier [3]. He writes, "Group Therapy for Particle Physics (at least for particle theorists) seems like an excellent idea."

I have not read the book Not Even Wrong but read the following passage in the book description on an Amazon Web page:

"Not Even Wrong" shows that what many physicists call superstring “theory” is not a theory at all. It makes no predictions, not even wrong ones, and this very lack of falsifiability is what has allowed the subject to survive and flourish.

This view can certainly lead to the thought that string theorists need "therapy." So, Woit is surely joking here. In fact, "Group Therapy" in the subtitle of the book is a typo, which should read "Group Theory." At the end of his blog post, Woit added three other examples of the same typo in publications related to group theory.

I also saw the same typo on the occasion of "Third International Workshop on Electron and Photon Transport Theory" held in Indianapolis in 1999. On the name tag of participants, the title of the workshop was printed as "Third International Workshop on Electron and Photon Transport Therapy" [4].

References

P. Woit, Not Even Wrong (Basic Books, 2006; paperbound 2007).
P. Woit, "An Introduction to Group Therapy for Particle Physics," Blog site Not Even Wrong (January 24, 2012).
Bookshelf, CERN Courier (January 25, 2012).
T. Tabata, "Stolen Joke," Web page Surely I'm Joking!: A Physicist's Personal Essays (August 18, 1999).

Einstein's Equation for Success

2012-01-17T21:07:00.000+09:00

The equation for the equivalence of mass and energy, E=mc², was discovered by Albert Einstein, and is particularly popular. Do you know Einstein's equation for success in life? It is also quite simple and yet has a deep meaning.

If A is success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut. — Albert Einstein

Rewriting the above words in the form of an equation, we get:

A = x + y + z,

where A = success, x = work, y = play, and z = (mouth shut).

We know the following two proverbs: (1) All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. (2) Speech is silver, silence is golden. Einstein succeeded in unifying these proverbs into a single equation, though his quest for a unified theory of everything was too much ahead of time and fruitless.

I have learned the above words of Einstein from Ref. 1, but do not find them at least in the original edition I have of Ref. 2.

Note added later: The source of Einstein's words given here is described in Ref. 3 as follows:

Said to Samuel J Woolf, Berlin, Summer 1929. Cited with additional notes in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice and Freeman Dyson, Princeton UP (2010) p 230.

References

RSICC Newsletter, No. 486, Radiation Safety Information Computational Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, U.S.A. (August 2005).
A. Calaprice, ed., The New Quotable Einstein (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005; the original edition The Quotable Einstein published in 1996).
"Albert Einstein," Wikiquote, at the end of "1920s" (14 January 2012, at 18:41).

The Gift to the Grandchild

2011-12-18T11:04:00.001+09:00

The pages of Michiko Hasegawa's essay [1].
Early January of this year, I read the essay entitled "A gift from my grandmother" [1]. The idea of this blog post has been in my mind since then. The author of the essay is the philosopher Michiko Hasegawa, who is the granddaughter of Yaeko Nogami. The "grandmother" in the title of the essay means this famous novelist; and the "gift," a letter written by her. That letter is quoted by spending the space of just one-third of the full essay.

When she was young, Hasegawa made a literary work of the review style, " 'Sasameyuki' to yamato-gokoro {[Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's] 'Sasameyuki' and the psychology of the Japanese}" and sent it to the literary magazine "Umi (The Sea)" of Chuokoronsha, Inc. Then, Yaeko wrote that letter and handed it to her granddaughter, saying, "Use this when you think that it might help you." Hasegawa's work was accepted for publication without the help of her grandmother's kindhearted letter. So, the "gift" has been in a deep corner of a drawer of Hasegawa's desk more than 30 years. Reading it again, she writes, "This is not a simple, private letter but my grandmother's essay on her theory of arts and literature."

On reading Hasegawa's essay, I could not but ponder about what I could do for my grandchildren. Soon after that, my oldest grandson (freshman of a university at the time) had his birthday. It has been my practice these years to write him an English email on his birthday. This year, I included in that annual email my advice to him as a small gift. The advice was the same one as written by Professor Akira Suzuki, one of the 2010 Nobel laureate in chemistry, in The Asahi Shimbun shortly before that and was also based on my own experience: "You, university students, should read text books, not in Japanese translation, but by original English editions."

Some days later, I was acquainted with an overseas, 16-year old boy on Twitter. He tweeted that he intensely admired Einstein; and that he asked his teacher about the relativity but that he was not given answers. So, I asked him to write me what kind of questions he had. He continually asks me serious questions, and I write him answers to all of them by thinking that doing so is a gift, not to my own grandchildren, but to the boy of the same generation as the grandchildren. (As for those questions and answers, I will write a series of blog posts in due course.)

Michiko Hasegawa, The gift from my grandmother, Tosho No. 743, p. 6 (2011) In Japanese.

Keisuke Toyama Christmas Piano Concert

2011-12-04T09:24:00.001+09:00

Yesterday afternoon, my wife and I went to Sakai Civic Hall to listen to "Keisuke Toyama Christmas Piano Concert." Toyama was born in Sapporo in 1984 and got the first rank for the piano section of the 73rd Japan Music Competition in 2004. Thus, he is one of pianists whose activity in the future is much expected. The program included Beethoven's Piano Sonatas No. 8 "Pathétique" and No. 23 "Appassionata." An encore was Franz Liszt's "Dream of Love" No. 3.

One of the factors that make the joy of listening to music seems to be two kinds of repetition. One kind is the repetition of the listener's experience, i.e., repeated listening to the work we already know; and the other, the repetition in the structure of the work, i.e., repeated appearance of the melody that constitutes the theme of the single work. Did anyone already write a similar thing? If you knew that this was the case, you would just have enjoyed the repetition of reading the same thought.

Which Is the Real One?

2011-09-03T10:49:00.002+09:00

The cover of the August 18 issue of Nature carried a fancy photo in order to symbolize one of the letter report [1] in the issue, together with the introductory words, "Coffee break: Cleaning up the 'coffee-ring' effect has practical applications in particle deposition." The mechanical pencil in the photo was of nearly the same size as a real one, so that I often reached my hand out to pick it up while the journal was on the desk. To commemorate my repeated mistake, I took a picture of the cover with a real pencil on it. Can you guess which is the real one?

P. J. Yunker, T. Still, M. A. Lohr and A. G. Yodh, Suppression of the coffee-ring effect by shpae-dependent capillary interactions, Nature vol. 476, p. 308 (2011).

My Face Flew with Discovery

2011-03-08T20:41:00.003+09:00

I participated in "Face in Space" of NASA. It is the project to launch the images and (or) names of the participants into orbit to make them a part of history. My participation was for Shuttle Discovery's Mission STS-133. Its flight was delayed a few times from the originally planned return date of September 25, 2010, to March 7, 2011. Thus, I got my commemorative flight certificate signed by the Mission Commander (the above image) yesterday. The words on the certificate read as follows:

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Face in Space
Congratulations!
This certifies that the face of Tatsuo Tabata has flown in space aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery on mission STS-133 from February - March 9, 2011. The face was flown on Discovery's mission to the International Space Station at an altitude of 220 miles above the Earth. It flew at a speed of more than 17,400 miles per hour as it orbited our planet. On behalf of my crew and all of NASA, we thank you for sharing the excitement of our mission and welcome your interest in space exploration. We were glad to have you aboard.

STS-133 Commander Steven W. Lindsey

The next mission STS-134 is currently scheduled to launch April 19, 2011, and you can still take part in the project.

Note added later: The mission STS-133 was the last one the Discovery performed. Read the related stories "A Bittersweet Finale for the Discovery" in New York Times (March 9, 2011) and "Space shuttle Discovery lands in Florida, capping its 39th and final mission" in Scientific American (Mar 9, 2011).

Feynman and the Mirror Puzzle

2011-01-23T09:42:00.000+09:00

On January 19, 2011, I found an online article about Feynman [1]. This article is a must read for Feynman fans, and I am sure that the person who is not yet a Feynman fan would also become a Feynman fan after reading it. I posted the following comment on it to express my little thought about Feynman.

It's regrettable that the publication of our paper that might supersede Feynman's explanation of the mirror puzzle was made after his passing. It would have been quite pleasant to talk with him about this puzzle.

The mirror puzzle is a fairly famous teaser expressed as: "Why does a mirror reverse left and right but not top and bottom?" Recently I just wrote the essence of our paper on Quora in reply to a question there [2].

"TED-X Caltec pays tribute to Feynman," Analysis by Jennifer Ouellette. "Caltech hosted its first ever TED-X conference last Friday, with talks by a diverse lineup of speakers all celebrating famed physicist Richard Feynman . . ." Discovery, News (January 18, 2011).
"The mirror puzzle: Reversal is attributed to the direction defined last." IDEA & ISAAC: Femto-Essays (January 14, 2011).

Dirac, Winnie-the-Pooh and Me

2010-06-07T09:05:00.004+09:00

On page 261 of "The Strangest Man" [1], the much acclaimed biography of Paul Dirac written by Graham Farmelo, I found the following passage.

After dinner, he [Dirac] would read one of the books Manci had recommended to him (including Winnie the Pooh) [. . .]

Dirac was a British theoretical physicist and shared the Nobel Prize in Physics 1933 with Erwin Schrödinger "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory." Manci was the sister of Eugene Wigner, who was a Hungarian-American physicist and also Nobel Laureate. Manci married Dirac in 1937. The anecdote expressed in the above quote was of two years before their marriage.

Stories in the book Winnie-the-Pooh [2] are about the adventures of a teddy bear [3]. Perhaps, most readers of this book are children, though it is also amusing to adults. Therefore, the fact that Dirac, then already a Nobel Laureate and more than thirty years old, read that book is smile provocative.

I especially like this anecdote for another reason. It is that I read Winnie-the-Pooh at an age similar to Dirac's when he read it. I read the Japanese edition of the book [4] to my first daughter Yuko (now forty-seven years old) when she was a small child. To my delight, she wrote in her blog a few years ago that she kept the copy of Winnie-the-Pooh, which I used to read to her, even then as one of her most valuable treasures.

While Yuko was still a little girl, I saw a father and his daughter at the bookshop of a department store in Osaka. They were looking for some English book. Soon the father found it. The daughter took a copy up from a small pile, opened it and read the first sentence of Chapter 1 aloud, "Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, . . ." She then said, "This is it!" The father bought it for her. Perhaps, she had learned the first chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh in English at school and wanted to read the whole book. I then wished to do the same in a few years for Yuko as that father did for her daughter; but it did not happen.

Instead, I had a chance of taking Yuko to a short animation film "Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree" [5] released by The Walt Disney Company in 1966. (The second daughter Yasuko was yet too young to watch it; and stayed home with my wife.)

In 1991, Mainichi Shimbun Company held an exhibition of the original illustrations drawn by Ernest Shepard for the books Winnie-the-Pooh, The House at Pooh Corner and The Wind in the Willows at a department store in Osaka. I went to see it with my wife. On that occasion, I bought a booklet [6] of 48 pages. It includes lovely illustrations, in which Christopher Robin, Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore and other cute animals in Winnie-the-Pooh are seen. I still keep that booklet.

Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, quantum Genius (Faber and Faber, London, 2009).
A. A. Milne, Ernest H. Shepard (illustr.) Winnie-the-Pooh (Dutton Juvenile, Boson, 1988; first published by Methuen, London, 1926).
"Winnie-the-Pooh (book)" Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (6 March 2010 at 20:06).
A. A. Milne, Ernest H. Shepard (illustr.), Momoko Ishi (transl.), クマのプーさんプー横丁にたった家 (Iwanami, 1962; first published 1940).
"Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree", Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (31 May 2010 at 20:41).
The World of Winnie-the-Pooh & Ernest Shepard (Winnie-the-Pooh Festival Executive Committee, 1991).

"Kwontamu" or "Kwantamu" for Quantum

2010-03-04T17:30:00.008+09:00

Go to Japanese version

In written Japanese language, the words borrowed from foreign languages are expressed by one of two types of phonetic characters called katakana. For the word "quantum," we have a proper Japanese word "ryōshi." Therefore, it is quite rare to see katakana expression for "quantum."

In reading books written in English, however, I had kept the habit of reading "quantum" in my mind by the pronunciation close to the katakana expression "クォンタム (kwontamu)." One or two years ago, I found a different katakana expression, "クァンタム (kwantamu)," in an essay by Sin-itiro Tomonaga. Because Tomonaga was a Nobel-winning physicist, I thought that his expression should be accepted and became to pronounce "quantum" like "kwantamu."

In the morning of Sunday, February 21, I saw the katakana expression "kwontamu" in the title of a new novel reviewed in the Asahi Shimbun. The full title of the book was "クォンタム・ファミリーズ (Kwontamu Famirīzu)" [1] meaning "Quantum Families." Then I wondered which expression is closer to the pronunciation of "quantum," "kwontamu" or "kwantamu." I looked up a dictionary and learned belatedly that "kwontamu" is closer to British pronunciation, and "kwantamu" to American pronunciation. Thus, we should consider both the expressions to be valid. Tomonaga's studies abroad were at Leipzig and Princeton, making it reasonable for him to use "kwantamu."

Hiroki Azuma, Kwontamu Famirīzu (Shinchōsha, 2009). The author uses the parallel world hypothesis in modern physics to depict the mixture of plural stories.

Extremely Small Errors in Casimir's Book

2010-02-11T13:45:00.005+09:00

On April 5, 2000, I posted at my Web site [1] the two letters I sent to Hendrik Casimir in 1984. He was famous for research on two-fluid model of superconductors and the Casimir effect; and passed away about a month later, on May 4, 2000. In my first letter I pointed out a minor error in his autobiographical book [2] about the date of Japanese capitulation in World War II. He wrote in his reply to me [3], "It is not easy entirely to avoid errors in a book of this kind." Then, he added three examples of errors he found by himself. I write those errors here, with additions of explanations of contexts and my thoughts, for the benefit of the people who already read his book or will read it in the future. The errors seem to be extremely minor, just as the Casimir effect can be observed between the electrodes placed at distances extremely small.

On Page 85, Casimir quotes Paul Eherenfest's words given to Wolfgang Pauli as follows: Ihre Arbeiten gefallen mir besser als Sie selber. (Your papers please me better than you yourself.) Afterwards, however, the author became fairly certain that what Ehrenfest said was this: Ihre Arbeiten gefallen mir besser als Ihr Gesicht. (Your papers please me better than your face.) The correct version sounds harsher than the printed version.

On page 207, the author writes, "[Richard Becker's arrival at Göttingen] was at the time when Germany was already facing the possibility of a defeat at Stalingrad." In fact, Becker arrived after Germany's defeat at Stalingrad. Therefore, Becker's words, "I do not want to see our troops annihilated . . . ," should also be changed into "I did not want to see . . ."

On page 212, with respect to one of the situations after the liberation of part of Netherlands from Nazi Germany, Casimir writes, "A local broadcasting station operated at the Philips works and the only official station in the liberated part of the country—it had the proud name "Vrij Nederland" (Free Netherlands)—transmitted the latest news." The actual name was "Herrijzend Nederland" (Re-arising Netherlands). Did the error come from the fact that both the words "free" and "re-arising" in Dutch include characters "rij," in addition to their similar meanings?

T. Tabata, "To Professor Hendrik Casimir," The Web site 'Surely I'm Joking!' (April 5, 2000).
H. B. G. Casimir, "Haphazard Reality: Half a Century of Science" (Harper & Row, New York, 1983).
H. B. G. Casimir, Private communication (January 5, 1985).

That isn't Kazumi, is that?

2010-02-02T11:15:00.006+09:00

Kazumi Maki, an excellent physicist in superconductivity and dear friend of mine since student days, passed in 2008 [1]. Last year I wrote about him in the Japanese version of Wikipedia. Concerning any modifications to be made of my description, I asked his wife Masako. She recommended me to consult an obituary of him in the journal Physica B [2, 3].

The first page of the obituary [2] carries a group photo. On looking at it, I thought as follows: The Japanese scientist there seems similar to Kazumi, but is perhaps another physicist in superconductivity. I might have seen a photo of the latter before at a Web page about John Bardeen Prize 2006 (Kazumi won the award that year, but the other scientists got the same prize or a similar one at the same time). I wanted to confirm my thought by looking at that Web page again, but could not find it. Thus, I sent an e-mail message to Naoki Toyota, Professor at Tohoku University. He is a former colleague of mine and ex-student of Kazumi. In the message to him I wrote, "That isn't Kazumi, is that?"

But alas! His answer showed definitively that my thought was wrong. He wrote that, judging from the look and the shape of the body, the Japanese person in the photo was Kazumi. He also referred to another picture at a Web site [4]. This picture was of the same occasion as that in Physica B but from a different angle. The person at the center of the picture has eyes full of curiosity, and surely I recognize him as Kazumi. Then, the Japanese person in the photo of Physica B must also be Kazumi, though the former's look and shape of the body are a little different from those of the latter I remember from earlier days.

I again looked for the Web page about Bardeen Prize and found it this time [5]. The page also gives the description of H. Kamerlingh Onnes Prize and a few other ones, with three photos. The caption lies below the photos, showing up only when we scroll the page down. I reminded myself of the following: Without scrolling the page, I first thought that the photos were of the scene of the awarding of Bardeen Prize and that the second person from right in the rightmost photo was Kazumi. However, looking at the expanded photo, I found that the person was a little similar to, but not, Kazumi. Then I returned to the original page and read the caption to learn that the person was Hidenori Takagi from Tokyo. He shared Onnes Prize with two scientists. (There are no photos of the three recipients of John Bardeen Prize, maybe because it is the Web page of Princeton University, to which N. Phuan Ong, one of the recipients of Onnes Prize, belonged but no recipients of Bardeen Prize did.)

Now I can explain the cause of my mistake as follows: When I browsed the Bardeen Prize Web page earlier, the enlarged photo disproved my belief that the Japanese person in the photo was Kazumi. This was a little traumatic happening to me. The vague memory of this made me commit the error together with the following curious fact: Kazumi's look with a gentle smile as in the photo of Physica B seems solemner (more like some other professor with dignity) than his look when he is serious. However, I also have to think this way: I have been a constant discoverer of errors in other persons' publications, but made an error this time in identifying the image of a good friend. Is this due to my aging?

"Kazumi Maki (1936–2008)," IDEA & ISAAC: Femto-Essays (2008).
"To the memories of Kazumi Maki," Physica B, Vol. 404, Nos. 3-4, p. xii (2009).
D. Baeriswyl, "Kazumi Maki," ibid., pp. xiii-xiv. A similar obituary is also given: D. Baeriswyl, S. Haas and D. Vollhardt, "Death notice: Kazumi Maki," physicstoday.org Web site (2009).
"In memory of Kazumi Maki," ECRYS-2008: 5th International Workshop on Electronic Crystals August 24-30, 2008 (2008).
"The 8th International Conference on Materials and Mechanisms of Superconductivity and High Temperature Superconductors (M2S-HTSC-VIII), Dresden, Germany (July 9 to July 14, 2006)," a Web page of Princeton University (2006).

The Backwards Image of Yukawa and Feynman

2010-01-28T16:27:00.004+09:00

The first episode of a series of my essays on Richard Feynman [1] is about the photo of Yukawa and Feynman that appeared backwards in Physics Today [2]. Last year I planned to make a book [3] by including the above series of essays, and wanted to use that photo by getting permission from AIP. So I searched it at AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

Bravo! The image was kept as printed previously [4], in spite of the fact that Peter Lee pointed out the backwards printing in a letter to the editor of Physics Today [5].

These days the normal image is simply gotten from the backwards one by a photo editing program, so that I was afraid that it might have been saved as the normal image. Permission to use the photo can be made easily at the Web site of Emilio Segrè Visual Archives. However, if the photo had been kept as the normal image, it should have been necessary for me to make special contact with them to get permission of the modified use of it, i.e., the use of horizontally flipped image as printed in [2] by describing the reason that my essay refers to . . .

By the way, you can also see the same photo printed backwards in the books [6] and [7] (in fact, the first mention of the photo in my essay is made of the one in [6]).

T. Tabata, What Little I Can Talk about Feynman, The Web site of IDEA (1999) [improvements and corrections made in the version included in [3] are not yet made in the Web version].
L. M. Brown and L. Hoddeson, Physics Today Vol. 35, No. 4, p. 36 (1982).
T. Tabata, Passage through Spacetime: Random Writing of a Physicist (Jupiter, Tokyo, 2009) [not for sale].
Catalog #: Hayakawa Satio D1, Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.
P. H. Y. Lee, Physics Today, Vol. 35, No. 9, p. 13 (1982); for a minor correction, see T. Tabata and P. H. Y. Lee, ibid. Vol. 36 No. 4, p. 90 (1983).
J. Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (Pantheon, New York, 1992; paperback edition, Vintage, 1993) p. 7 bottom of insert between pp. 118 and 119.
J. Mehra, The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (Clarendon, Oxford, 1994) plate 7 between pp. 320 and 321.

The Unit "Dirac"

2010-01-27T11:36:00.007+09:00

About twenty years ago, I asked one of my colleagues what was the unit "Dirac" for. He, a competent physicist, thought about it for a while in earnest, and replied ashamedly that he did not know. My question was a joke borrowed from the following passage in Ref. 1:

Dirac's taciturn and retiring behavior are famous; in his days at Cambridge, a unit of volubility called a dirac meant one word per year.

Reading a new biography of the Nobel-winning physicist P. A. M. Dirac [2], I found a different definition of the unit Dirac, i.e., one word per hour. This definition is more realistic than that in Ref. 1, but the latter, which exaggerates Dirac's taciturnity too much, is funnier than the former and too good to be discarded.

The relevant description in Ref. 2 is quoted in Ref. 3 under the title "Unit of taciturnity." Surely the unit commemorates Dirac's taciturnity, but it should be called a unit not of taciturnity but of volubility or talkativeness, because the number of words per unit time is smaller for the person of higher taciturnity.

[A similar story was posted earlier in Japanese: http://bit.ly/cf6ki0.]

References

N. Calder, The Key to the Universe (Viking, New York, 1977).
G. Farmelo, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius (Faber and Faber, London, 2009).
Unit of taciturnity: The Dirac, Laudator Temporis Acti (January 26, 2010).

The Reunion in Nara

2009-10-01T10:22:00.005+09:00

The Great Buddha Hall of Todai-ji
The Great Buddha of Todai-ji
Isuien Garden
The old boys and girls of the newspaper club at Kanazawa Kindai Senior High School (1949–1958) have a reunion every year in the city of Kanazawa, Kanto District or Kansai District. The reunion of 2009 was held in Nara from the evening of September 29 to the morning of the next day. The number of participants were eleven, and three of them were ladies.

We had a party and a party after party from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. at the Hotel Fujita on the first day, and stayed there at night. At the party held in the "Fuji-no-ma" Hall on the 7th floor, each person made a short speech about his or her recent life over beer, sake and Japanese dishes. Finally we sang "Kanazawa Bokyo-Ka (The Song of Nostalgia for Kanazawa)" made by Hiroyuki Itsuki and other songs on Kanazawa. The party after party was held at the bar on the first floor, and we talked over cocktail or watered-whisky in small groups made as we like.

At 9:30 next morning, ten members of us started the hotel and made a small guided trip on foot (partly by bus). The guides were two senior men, who works as volunteers. We visited Sarusawa Pond, the Kofukuji Temple Complex including the Southern Octagon Hall, and the Todai-ji Complex (from the Great Southern Gate to the Great Buddha Hall). At noon we reached Isuien Garden, where we had lunch and tea ceremony, and looked at the beautiful garden. During the trip, it rained often but not so hard. Therefore, we were able fully to enjoy the quietly shining scenery of the old capital.

Plural or Singular

2009-05-12T11:43:00.007+09:00

Wolfgang Pauli postulated his hypothesis of the existence of the neutrino in his letter to a gathering on radioactivity in Tübingen in 1930. The letter begins by the words, "Dear radioactive ladies and gentlemen" [1, 2]. Sin'itiro Tomonaga [3] quotes this letter and says, "By the way, radioactive lady apparently refers to Lise Meitner."

Pauli used the plural form, "radioactive ladies." Therefore, referring to these words in the singular form is inconsistent. Meitner was surely the key person who had found the experimental result that had led to Pauli's hypothesis. Was not there, however, other ladies, for example, Marie Curie, at the gathering? Even if he had had a firm proof that Meitner had been the single lady present, Tomonaga should have said, "By the way, radioactive ladies actually meant Lise Meitner."

By the way, I once started my presentation at an academic meeting by the words, "Good afternoon, a lady and gentlemen!" I wrote about that in "The Stolen Joke" [4]. Interestingly, the neutrino appears also in that story, though I have been forgetting about this fact.

A. Pais, Inward Bound (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986) p. 315.

K. Riesselmann, Logbook: Neutrino invention.

S. Tomonaga, The Story of Spin, translated by T. Oka (Univ. Chicago Press, Chicago, 1997) p. 219.

The Stolen Joke IDEA-ISAAC Web site (August 18, 1999).

The Sense of Humor

2009-05-04T20:44:00.006+09:00

In the book-review column of a British newspaper, the American physicist Richard Feynman was mentioned as British [1]. I read about this in an article, which was written by Hamish Johnston and posted at the blog site of physicsworld.com [2]. If I had found this erroneous description about Feynman, I would simply have thought it a stupid error. However, Johnston starts his article by the sentence, "One of the things that makes the British great is their love of eccentricity," and writes, "[Feynman] was famously eccentric so I can understand why a Brit reading about his antics would assume Feynman is British." This is a really good sense of humor shown by the British person.

Helen Brown, "Atomic: the First War of Physics and the Secret History of the Atom Bomb, 1939-49 by Jim Baggott: review" Daily Telegraph (April 16, 2009).

Hamish Johnston, "Surely you’re joking?" physicsworld.com Blog (April 22, 2009).

Superpartner

2009-05-03T18:02:00.005+09:00

Some theorists in the field of particle physics are studying the theory of supersymmetry (often abbreviated SUSY). In this theory, a superpartner particle is proposed to exist to be paired with each particle already known to exist (the Standard Model particle). Boson-type superpartners (with integer spins) corresponding to the Standard Model particles of fermion type (with half integer spins) are named by attaching "s" to the beginning of the names of the latter. For example, the superpartner of the electron is called selectron, the superpartner of the quark is called squark, and so on.

Last month I attended the lecture given by the particle theorist, Professor Tsuneo Uematsu of Kyoto University at the regular meeting of Science Cafe Kyoto. Uematsu wrote those names of particles and their superpertners on the whiteboard. Then he wrote his name "uematsu" as though it were the name of one of the Standard Model particles, and added the name of its superpartner "suematsu." Suematsu is a possible last name of the Japanese. Uematsu said, "I was surprised actually to see the particle theorist Dr. Suematsu at Kanazawa University." I liked this part of Uematsu's lecture most.

Bongo-playing Womanizer

2008-08-18T20:09:00.009+09:00

One of the best-seller books by Richard Feynman [1].

Whom do you think of to hear the word "bongo-playing womanizer"? Do you say, "Richard Feynman"? Yes, he was referred to as such in an article of Physics World blog [2]. In the article, Matin Durrani, Editor of Physics World, reports on all the gossip of the 25th International Conference on Low-Temperature Physics (LT25) held in Amsterdam from 6th to 13th, August, 2008.

Durani writes that the plenary sessions of the final day included a few words from Joe Vinen from the University of Birmingham in the UK — perhaps the only surviving physicist from the LT6 conference in Leiden 50 years ago, and continues as follows. 'Vinen recalled how the multi-talented Richard Feynman himself actually put in an appearance at the Leiden meeting to present his insights into superfluidity in liquid helium. Strangely, though, Feynman failed to up at any other sessions. The reason? The bongo-playing womanizer had chosen to enjoy the pleasures of what used to be called (in the bad old days) the conference “ladies program”.'

Why were those "the bad old days"? Oh, is the ladies program now called "the spouses program" or something like that to be politically correct? Anyway, those must have been the good days to Feynman. — He would care neither about these words nor about the words, "the bongo-playing womanizer." What do you care what other people think, Mr. Feynman? —

R. P. Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think? (Norton, 2001).

M. Durrani, Feynman 50 years ago, Physics World Web site (August 13, 2008).

Ralph Came to Japan

2006-06-23T08:10:00.009+09:00

Ralph Leighton

Ralph Leighton, the author of the book "Tuva or Bust! Richard Feynman's Last Journey," paid a twelve-day visit to Japan, and finally stayed in Osaka on the 20th and 21st of June, 2006. He is the son of Robert Leighton, who was a Caltech professor and an editor of "The Feynman Lectures on Physics."

Ralph made "Friends of Tuva" [1], a clearinghouse of information about Tuva. Tuva is the country Feynman and Ralph eagerly wanted to visit, but when their plan was almost complete, Feynman passed away. Masahiko Todoriki, who is a member of Tarbagan, sings Tuvan Khoomei (throat singing) and has made a new Web site of "Friends of Tuva Japan" [2], guided Ralph's travel group during its trip in Japan. The group consisted of Ralph, his wife, son, daughter and her friend. In the evening of June 20, Ako Hoki, who made Friends of Tuva Japan, and her husband Shigeaki joined him to entertain the travelers in Osaka.

I, one of the enthusiastic members of Friends of Tuva Japan, was asked to join them at a supper with Ralph in the evening of June 21. We talked over okonomiyaki (an Osaka-style dish) and beer at a restaurant in Umeda, Osaka. There I was also introduced to other members of the travelers. I heard that Ralph's group traveled energetically to Kanazawa, Noto (where Feynman once visited), Tokyo, Matsumoto (Masahiko's hometown), Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe and Awaji Island (Hokudan-cho Earthquake Memorial Park). Ralph seems to be a man of much curiosity and be interested in teaching just like Feynman.

I gave Ralph a reprint of a paper [3] on mirror reversal, in which Feynman's explanation of this problem in his student days was cited from James Gleick's book "Genius." I got in turn Ralph's signature in my copy of "Tuva or Bust!" as well as three copies of a "Feynmonk" poster. In this poster Feynman with a "Feynman diagram" in his right hand is portrayed in the garb of a Ladakhi monk. In the background is the scenery of Los Alamos, where Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project during the Second World War (when I saw the background first, I thought it a landscape of Tuva).

On July 22 Ralph's group departed from Kansai Airport to Hong Kong, which is the native town of his wife.

http://www.fotuva.org

http://www.tarbagan.net/fotj/

T. Tabata and S. Okuda, "Mirror reversal simply explained without recourse to psychological processes," Psychonomic Bulletin & Reviews, Vol. 7, No. 1, p. 170 (2000); Available online at http://www.psychonomic.org/PBR/.

Masterpieces of the Museum Island, Berlin

2005-08-06T08:00:00.011+09:00

My copy of Edouard Manet's "In the Conservatory" based on a post card and the leaflet of the exhibition mentioned in the main text. The lady in the copy looks younger than that in the original, and I like the former more, though it is, needless to say, artistically much inferior to the latter.

Last Friday the final road repairs after drainage works was going on in front of my house. My wife and I could not bear the noise of repair works and the smell of tar. We just had two tickets of the exhibition "Masterpieces of the Museum Island, Berlin: Visions of the Divine in the Sanctuary of Art" being held at Kobe City Museum. So, we went to see the exihibition.

The exhibition is one of the highlight cultural events of the "Germany in Japan 2005/2006" celebrations. The Museum Island (Museumsinsel) is a complex of buildings composed of individual museums located in the heart of Berlin, and was designated as a World Heritage site in 1999 [2]. The complex consists of five museum buildings: Altes Museum, Neues Museum, Altenationalgalerie, Bode Museum and the Pergamon Museum. The reconstruction of the complex is in progress to be completed in 2015.

The exhibition shows approximately 150 select artworks, many of which have come for the first time out of Germany, to convey the essence of the cultural landmark's future image. We can see works from prehistoric and ancient ages to the modern era. I especially liked "Altar Relief: Sun God Aten and Akhenaten's Family (New Kingdom, Dynasty 18, Amarna Period, ca. 1345 BC)," "Head of Cleopatra VII (ca. 40 BC)," "Venus (Sandro Botticelli, ca. 1485)" and "In the Conservatory (Edouard Manet, 1878-1879)" to name a few.

In front of "Head of Cleopatra VII" I remembered Blaise Pascal's words I had learned in a French grammar course of a university: "Si le nez de Cléopâtre avait été plus court, toute la face de la terre eût été changée. (If Cleopatra's nose had been shorter, all the surface of the earth would have been different.)"

Reference

Museumsinsel (Museum Island), Berlin (UNESCO World Heritage Web site).

Great People of Kanazawa Memorial Museum

2005-08-01T08:14:00.002+09:00

From the leaflet of Great People of Kanazawa Memorial Museum.
After looking at two exhibitions and having lunch at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, on July 22, my wife and I visited Great People of Kanazawa Memorial Museum [1] nearby. The Memorial Museum displays the materials of the following persons born or grown up in Kanazawa: (from left to right in the upper row of the photos in the image) Yoshiro Taniguchi, architect (1904-1979); Jokichi Takamine (1854-1922), chemist; Setsurei Miyake, critic (1860-1945); (in the middle row) Godo Nakanishi, conservationist and poet (1895-1984); Toho Fujioka, scholar on Japanese literature (1870-1910); (in the bottom row) Yoichi Hatta, civil engineer (1886-1942); Daisetsu Suzuki, scholar on Buddhism (1870-1966); Hisashi Kimura, astronomer (1870-1943).

The building of the museum consists of three floors. On the first floor, materials of Taniguchi, Nakanishi and Hatta are shown; and on the second floor, those of the other five persons. The third floor has a hall and a lecture room. I was especially interested in the materials of Takamine, because I was one of the recipients of the third Takamine Prize for high school students [2] (now personal recipients are chosen from junior high school students, and a group prize is provided for junior high schools).

Though it was one of summer holidays, there were no other visitors while we were in the Memorial Museum. It would be highly desirable to let children visit such a place in order to know the life and work of the great people and have dream and ambition, as written in the leaflet of the museum.

There are respective memorial museums at other sites for the three writers born in Kanazawa: Izumi Kyoka (1873-1939), Tokuda Shusei (1871-1943) and Murou Saisei (1889-1962) [3-5].

References

Web site, Great People of Kanazawa Memorial Museum (in Japanese).
Web site, Dr. Takamine Jokichi Memorial Foundation (in Japanese).
Web site, Izumi Kyoka Kinenkan Museum (in Japanese).
Web site, Tokuda Shusei Kinenkan Museum (in Japanese).
Web site, Murou Saisei Kinenkan Museum (in Japanese).

The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

2005-07-28T16:03:00.006+09:00

The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.
I first visited the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, (see the above photo) just after a week of its opening on October 9, 2004. Last Friday (July 22, 2005) I made the second visit there with my wife. The outermost walls of the first floor of this museum form a circle with a diameter of 112.5 m. This form makes it possible to explore the museum from all directions [1].

There we looked at two exhibitions: "Drawing Restraint: Matthew Barney" and "Another Story: Selected Works from the Collection." Barney's exhibition was the sum of his rather strange drawings (for example, a self-portrait drawn on the ceiling by jumping on a trampoline), sculptures, photographs and a film (expressing an abstract story suggesting a repeated rebirth and collapse by the use of images of whaling and the tea ceremony).

The purpose of "Another Story" was to show part of the diversity of the event, pattern of human perception and sense value in the world. I found Carsten Nicolai's work entitled "Milk" interesting. It consisted of 10 monochromatic photographs, which captured the surface patterns of milk in a tray shaken by different frequencies from 10 to 110 Hz. Soft hemispheres constituting the patterns singly or in aggregate made me think of the source of milk, i.e., breasts.

Web site "21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa".

The Oldest Fountain in Japan

2005-07-26T15:42:00.009+09:00

Japan's first fountain built in 1861.

The fountain in Kenroku Park (see the photo) is associated with a special memory of mine. One of my brothers, who was senior to me by six years and died at the age of 9, left an unfinished drawing of that fountain. I kept it until I was of the same age as he had been at his death. So, every time when I visit Kenroku Park these years, I go to see this fountain.

Last Friday, my wife and I passed through Kenroku Park to go to the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and saw that fountain on our way. I did not remember what was written on the bulletin board at the side of the fountain, but it reads as follows ("Kasumiga-ike" in the quotation is a large pond in Kenroku Park).

Fountain: Having been built in 1861, this is the oldest fountain in Japan. Its water source is Kasumiga-ike, and a head of water makes the height of jet about 3.5 m.

The above is my translation from Japanese words on the bulletin board; English words there simply read: "Funsui (Fountain); Japan's first fountain built in 1861."

Ishikawa Gate

2005-07-24T20:24:00.009+09:00

Ishikawa Gate.

I made a small trip to Kanazawa and Yamashiro Spa from the 21st to 23rd of July with my wife. On the first day in Kanazawa we visited our ancestors' graves on Mt. Noda and at temples in Tera-machi and No-machi.
Across just the inside of one of entrances, which we have been using, to the graveyard of Mt. Noda, the construction works of a wide car road were in progress. What will be the method of pedestrians' crossing over the road? At least some of the visitors to the graveyard would suffer much inconvenience.

In the morning of the second day we took a loop bus from the JR Kanazawa Station to an entrance of Kenroku Park. The entrance is near Ishikawa Gate (the photo) of Kanazawa Castle. We walked Kenroku Park a little and went to the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.

The site of Kanazawa Castle was used by the army from 1871 to the end of the 2nd World War, and then by Kanazawa University from 1949. Ishikawa Gate, which was both the symbol of the destroyed castle and the entrance of the university, was designated as an important national cultural asset in 1950. However, the university campus moved out of the castle site during 1978 to 1995. After the completion of the relocation of the university, the castle site was rearranged to become the Kanazawa Castle Park [1]. Thus the bridge (Ishikawa-bashi) seen in the photo in front of Ishikawa Gate now connects the two parks, Kenroku Park and Kanazawa Castle Park.

Some more story of our trip will be described later.

References

Kanazawa Castle Park.

The Oldest Photo I Have

2005-07-17T20:29:00.004+09:00

The image of the oldest photo I have is hsown here. It was taken in the spring of 1908 (the 41st year of Meiji) to send to the father (my grandfather) of the children in this photo on the occasion that three of the children entered new schools. My grandfather was on a long business trip of inspecting education systems in European countries.

From left in the front row: Misu (my grandmother, 39 years old), Chiyoko (my mother who was 6 years old and just entered the Elementary School Affiliated to Kanazawa Women's Normal School) and Fumiko (one of my aunts, 8 years old and in the 3rd year class at the same school as Chiyoko's). From left in the rear row: Toshibumi (my uncle who was 13 years old and just entered Kanazawa 2nd Middle School) and Yuki (one of my aunts who was 15 years old and just entered Kanazawa Women's Normal School). I have never met Yuki, because she died young. My mother used to call her Okinesan (big sister).

I Was the Only Male Visitor!

2005-07-14T20:45:00.010+09:00

The ticket of the exhibition "Japanese Imagery in One Hundred Quilts."
Yesterday (Monday), water supply was supposed to be stopped in the afternoon because of waterworks around here. So, my wife and I did not want to stay home, and went, together with our first daughter Yuko, to see the exhibition, "Japanese Imagery in One Hundred Quilts," being held at Museum "EKi" KYOTO in the building of the JR Kyoto Station. Quilting is one of Yuko's hobbies.

On the back of the ticket (see the image above) it is written that these years Japanese quilt works, especially "the quilts of Japonism," are giving big influence to the quilt community world over. The exhibition displays new works on the theme of Japan's beauty made by 75 representative Japanese quilt artists as well as the works of Japanese imagery by 25 invited overseas artists. All the quilts seem to be of the size from F100 to F200 or more by the term of painting, and show both fine technique and power. I found the works entitled "Cherry blossoms in mandala" (partly shown on the ticket), "Kaleidoscopes" and "Nothingness" impressive. While we were looking at the exhibition, there were many women, but I was the only male visitor!

Coming back home, we were informed of the postponing of the waterworks to Wednesday due to rainfall. Where shall we go next?

Physics Class in My Senior High School Days

2005-07-06T19:30:00.004+09:00

In 1952 I was a second year student of a senior high school in Kanazawa. One day the teacher of our physics class took us out to a nearby transformer substation to look at equipment there. Then the teacher took a photo of us. I am the third person from left in the second row. The rightmost person in the front row is probably the head of the substation. Note that the ratio of the number of boys to that of girls in the physics class was 9 to 1, although the total number of boys in the school was nearly the same as that of girls.

One-Day Trip to Chihaya-akasaka Village

2005-07-03T20:26:00.005+09:00

A sketch from the restaurant Santoka in Chihaya-akasaka Village. The building at the upper left is the residence of the owner of the restaurant. On the right, the side of the roofed, white gate of the residence is seen.

Yesterday (July 2, Saturday) my wife and I joined the one-day group trip organized by a travel agency. We got on a bus in front of the JR Ten'noji Station. The number of the group members was 35. We first visited Enmeiji Temple in Kawachi-nagano. There is a lotus pond in the garden of the temple, where we saw no flowers but some buds. It is a good place to visit in autumn, because there are many maple trees, among which the largest is about one thousand years old. That one has the name yubae-no-kaede (maple beautiful in the evening sun).

Then we went to Chihaya-akasaka Village. This is an only single village in Osaka Prefecture. The destination of our trip was the restaurant Santoka [1] at the foot of a mountain. The owner of the restaurant and his families has been living there since the days of their ancestors, who made a living by forestry. Now the part of the land around the restaurant is one of the most famous spots to see rhododendrons and hydrangeas. After having a fancy dish for lunch, we walked along the mountain roads to look at flowers of hydrangeas and other plants.

It had been raining rather hard until we finished lunch. In the afternoon, the rain became less hard, so that we could enjoy walking rather comfortably by breathing cool air of a forest. I did not brought with me tools for sketching. However, I made the sketch shown above after lunch by the use of a pencil and a sheet of pocket paper, on which sweet stuff had been served together with a cup of Japanese tea. I completed the sketch with a pen and color pencils after coming back home.

Web site, Santoka (in Japanese).

"Van Gogh in Context"

2005-07-01T21:45:00.004+09:00

The image shows my poor copy from Van Gogh's
"Road with Cypress and Star."
On June 21 (Tue.), 2005, I went to the National Museum of Art, Osaka, (NMAO) to look at the exhibition "Van Gogh in Context" together with my wife.

The NMAO was opened in 1977 by the use of the Expo Museum of Fine Arts, which had been built for Expo '70. In 2004 the NMAO was relocated to the western section of Osaka's Nakanoshima district. This was our first visit to the new NMAO building. The building has a structure in the form of a completely underground facility and an exterior design "inspired by the life force of bamboo and the development and cultivation of contemporary art" [1].

The present exhibition was realized with special cooperation from the Van Gogh Museum and the Kröller-Müller Museum, both located in Van Gogh's homeland of Holland. Just as written in the leaflet of the exhibition, we could trace the changes in Van Gogh's paintings from the dark hues of his early naturalistic paintings to the dazzling colors of his later works.

Another feature of the exhibition was its attempt to provide cultural context for Van Gogh's artistic activities. For this purpose the works of artists such as Millet, Cézanne and Monet, whom Van Gogh knew and was influenced by, as well as Japanese ukiyo-e and books and magazines of Van Gogh's era were also shown (thus the exhibition is entitled "Van Gogh in Context").

I liked the following three paintings best among Van Gogh's works shown: "Self-portrait as an Artist," 1888, Paris, Oil on canvas, 65.2×50.2 cm, Van Gogh Museum; "Café Terrace at Night," 1888, Arles, Oil on canvas, 80.7×65.3 cm, Kröller-Müller Museum; and "Road with Cypress and Star," 1890, Saint-Rémy, Oil on canvas, 90.6×72 cm, Kröller-Müller Museum. (It was quite lucky that just these three paintings are shown at the Web site of the NMAO with their titles in English!)

I paid special attention to "Café Terrace at Night," because a friend of mine, M.Y., wrote me that he had chosen the best kind of copy of this work at the same exhibition held in Tokyo to buy it as a birthday gift to his wife. Only it was a pity that the museum was too much crowded.

Web site, The National Museum of Art, Osaka.

Trip to the North of Kyoto Prefecture

2005-06-23T20:27:00.001+09:00

Maizuru Bay seen from the window of a hotel
at the top of Mt. Goro, Maizuru, Kyoto.
From June 12 (Sun.) to 14 (Tue.), my wife and I made a trip to the northern cities of Kyoto Prefecture: Fukuchiyama, Ayabe and Maizuru. (Cricking blue characters below, you can see the the photo of each place in a new window, though explanations are in Japanese.)

On Sunday, we arrived at the JR Fukuchiyama Station in the early afternoon, and visited Fukuchiyama Castle. The castle was originally built by Mitsuhide Akechi around 1580, but was destroyed in Meiji Era except for stonewalls. The present castle tower was reconstructed in 1986.

Then we walked on Otonase Bridge over the Yura river to go to Sandan-ike Park. We were surprised to see that there was no water in Sandan Pond. Leveling of the ground was proceeding to make a playground there. I wonder if it is a good plan to destroy a big pond and accordingly the ecological system of Sandan-ike Park filled with many plants and creatures.

The place of our stay at two nights was located at the top of Mt. Goro in Maizuru. From the window of our room, we had a fine view of Maizuru Bay, and I made a sketch of it. The sketch of the next morning and that of the morning after next show views further to left (west). The mountain at the center of the last sketch is Mt. Tatebe, which is also called Tango-Fuji because of its shape similar to Mt. Fuji.

On Monday, we arrived at the JR Maizuru Station rather late in the morning. So we hurried to Ayabe Friendly Ranch to have lunch at a restaurant there. We saw Yura River again on our way there.

Walking for 40 minutes or so in the foot of Mt. Takashiro, we lost a way and asked a countryman the way to the ranch. He told us that there was no ranch there any more and that it was being converted to a site of a riding club. Alas! Anyway, we had to go to the old ranch. Leveling of the ground was also in progress there. Luckily, there remained a restaurant, so that we were able to have lunch there.

Coming back from the old ranch along a path through rice fields, we saw a small scoop wheel and a field of irises in full bloom. The scoop wheel seems to have been constructed for sightseers by drawing its model from those that actually helped agricultural laborers in old days.

In the morning of Tuesday, we walked near the JR Higashi-maizuru Station to see Kitasui Railway Tunnel, the Maizuru City Commemoration Hall and the World Brick Museum. All these brick constructions, now preserved as cultural heritages, were originally built for the former Japan Navy. Looking at them, I thought that we should never make such buildings for war again.

Then We Couldn’t Have Been Your Pupils!

2005-06-11T23:26:00.001+09:00

The reunion of our class at the former Ishibiki Elementary School in Kanazawa was held at the Japanese style hotel Takitei in Kanazawa Saikawakyo Spa from the evening of June 2 to the morning of June 3, 2005. Participants were our teacher Mr. A and his wife, 16 class OGs including Prof. H.I. from USA and her younger sister to help her travel, and nine OBs including myself; a total of 27 people. The number of pupils in our class was 61. Among them six OBs died already.

The party of the reunion took place from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm. We were seated along the three lines of tables put in the shape of the Greek capital pi, with Mr. A at the center of the shorter line. Mrs. A who has a problem at her knees took a seat at the corner of one of the two long sides. The other particiants' seats were determined by drawing.

The organizer in chief, Y.T., presided the party. He explained that this reunion celebrated Mr. A's age of 80 (actually he is now 83 years old) and ours of 70, and then asked Mr. A to give a short talk. Mr. A began saying, "I came to Ishibiki Elementary School just after you finished it." Some OGs and OBs said, "Oh, no! Then we couldn't have been your pupils!" "It's wrong!" "Let's say for his honor, 'Mr. A is quite right.' " and so on.

Does Mr. A have Alzheimer's disease? No, that was a slip of the tongue. He wanted to say, "I left Ishibiki Elementary School soon after you finished it." Thus the reunion started with a big laughter, and merry mood continued all through the party and a party after party, which ended at 11:00 pm. It was an experience like a time slip into elementary school days.

At the party after party, H.I. told me that she had had the disaster of losing the memory of her lap-top computer by exposing it to X-ray inspection at an airport. On June 5, I called her at her mother's house in Takarazuka to ask if I could help her with her computer. However, it seemed that I could have nothing to do, because she had lost only document files and because she had back-up files back in USA. Wishing to get a copy of her publication some day, I sent her the book "Kagami-no Naka-no Hidarikiki (A Left-Hander in a Mirror)," in which I had written a comment of twenty pages.

The Middle Name

2005-06-06T22:10:00.003+09:00

The photo shows the entrance of the Hotel Takitei in Kanazawa Saikawakyo Spa, where the reunion of our elementary school class was held (taken June 3, 2005). Click on the image to see the real size one.

For some days after getting the announcement of the reunion of our class at the former Ishibiki Elementary School in Kanazawa, I was unable to decide whether I should attend it or not. It was because I saw some of my classmates on the occasion of the reunion of the same year classes of that elementary school held last autumn, and because I visited our teacher, Mr. A., last summer. So I sent an e-mail message to one of my classmates and good rival, Prof. H.I., who works at the University of California at Santa Barbara, to ask if she would attend the reunion this time.

But, alas, the next day I found that the message had not reached H.I. Then, I made the search of her name on the Internet and learned her new e-mail address from the home page of the university. Her name on the home page newly had the initial of the middle name "G." So, I wrote her not only the question about her possibility of participation in the reunion but also the guess that her middle name came from her nickname in elementary school days. Her nickname given by some boys in our class was Gacha, meaning an "unattractive look" in the dialect of Kanazawa, and she admitted it as her nickname. So I supposed she adopted it as her middle name from the sense of humor.

H.I. wrote me back promptly, "I am planning to attend the reunion with my sister. My middle name comes from my mother's maiden name!" Her planning of attending helped my decision to do the same, but I was ashamed to think that my guess might have been rude to her. For the sake of her honor, I have to write here that I do not think her look unattractive. Sure, she is not such a woman as is regarded as beautiful by men's average standard, but her look filled with strong will, high intelligence and good health is a different kind of excellent beauty.

Trip to Two Castle Towns

2005-05-28T11:50:00.000+09:00

The Lake Biwa seen from a hotel in Hikone, Shiga. (You can see the real size image by clicking on the image above.)

On May 23 (Mon.) and 24 (Tue.), my wife and I made a trip to small cities of Nagahama and Hikone at the side of the Lake Biwa in Shiga Prefecture. Arriving at the JR Nagahama Station, we first walked through Ho Park to look at buildings of Nagahama Castle and the Old Nagahama Station. (Cricking orange characters below, you can see the image of each place.)

Nagahama Castle had originally been built by Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598) and was rebuilt in 1983 to be used as the Museum of History. The Old Nagahama Station was built in 1882, and is the oldest station building now preserved in Japan. We had lunch and beer at the fancy restaurant of the name " Nagahama Roman Beer" near Hokkoku Kaido Street. Then we visited Shanain Temple and Daitsuji Temple, and enjoyed looking at a number of glassware shops in Kurokabe (Black Walls) Square.

When we took a train at the Nagahama Station to go to Hikone, it suddenly began to rain cats and dogs. After our arriving at a hotel in Hikone, however, it stopped raining. From the window of the hotel room, we saw the Lake Biwa (see the sketch above). The members of the baseball club of a senior high school came to take exercise at the lakeside. I draw them in the sketch; they did not seem to be engaged in hard exercise.

On Tuesday we visited Hikone Castle to look at Genkyuen Garden and other historic spots. Then we walked through Yumekyobashi Castle Road, along which traditional houses of the castle town in Edo Era had been reconstructed as shops. After going down the road to Soanji Temple, which had a red gate, we made toward home. It was impressive that both the two cities well preserve or have reconstructed historic spots and streets.

Wedding Invitation from India

2005-04-20T19:58:00.000+09:00

Yesterday I received a wedding invitation from India by e-mail. The e-mail message of invitation had an attachment of a PDF file, in which an announcement was written in English and Indian.

This was the second time to get such an invitation from India, so that I was not surprised at all this time. Indians seem to have the habit of sending wedding invitation to all their friends and acquaintances.

The first time I received a wedding invitation from India was on the occasion of the marriage of a brother of a friend of mine, Indra, in April 2001. Indra lives in U.S.A., and the invitation was sent by a relative of his by postal mail from India. I told Indra about my getting the invitation, and he was rather surprised, too.

The invitation I got yesterday was from a young scientist, who now studies at a university in Korea. Formerly he had wanted to study in Japan, found my home page, and written me by e-mail some years ago. Then he and I became friends, and he got some samples of the experiment for his thesis irradiated by gamma rays at my former work place. However, we have never met yet. I sent him an e-mail letter of congratulations together with a photo I took of cherry blossoms just beginning to bloom.

I Like a Fine Day

2005-03-28T20:28:00.000+09:00

I like a fine day.
Then I can
talk with you
during my walk,
though it's
only in my imagination.

I've told
so much
to you
having your image
over the sky,
among white clouds.

Let's begin
our real
and shy
conversation
of every vacation
in minus x years!

Scientific Love: Comic Poems

2005-02-28T08:42:00.000+09:00

Relativistic Love

Two lines come close, go apart
come and united, go apart,
come and united, go apart,
almost come to be united, go apart,
go apart further and further,
come to a soft touch, and go apart...
What shapes do
your and my world lines
have beyond this?

Boolean Love

You OR I,
this is union.
You AND I,
this makes intersection.
Which do you like?
I like the latter,
'cause I love you so deeply.

Serenades Played with Erhu

2005-02-02T16:57:00.003+09:00

A young friend of mine, Yoro, is running a small company to make and sell CDs in Ebetsu, Hokkaido. Last week I ordered him a CD [1] made in China and sold by his company. It is a collection of serenades played by Zhu Changyao with an erhu by the accompaniment of the Orchestra of the Music and Dance Troop of Jiangsu Province of China. Zhu Changyao is a popular Chinese erhu virtuoso and composer. The erhu is a traditional Chinese string instrument with two strings.

The CD arrived this afternoon. It includes "English Serenade," Schumann's "Traumerei," Dvorak's "Humoresque," Schubert's "Lullaby," De Curtis's "Come Back to Sorrento," Brahms's "Lullaby," etc. Listening to those well-known pieces of music played with an erhu in quiet and nostalgic tone, my heart, being hurt by dark pieces of news these days, was much soothed and warmed, though it was terribly cold today.

"Zhu Changyao's Art of Erhu No. 4: Serenade" (Jiangsu Culture Audio and Video Publishing House, China; sold by Booxbox).

The Model in Flamenco Costume

2005-01-09T19:51:00.000+09:00

Last week a letter from Masami, a classmate of mine, arrived at my wife. My wife and I wondered why she wrote my wife, not me. Reading her letter, we learned this: She wrote me first, and after sealing the envelope she wanted also to write my wife reminding herself of the latter's voice when the former called me last year.

Masami enclosed a gift, to my wife, of postcards on which drawings of plants were printed. Those drawings are the works of a female botanical artist who lives in the same city as Masami and whom she likes.

Somehow Masami's letter to me arrived the next day. She wrote an excuse for not sending me a New Year card because of being in the mourning and thanked me for telling her about Takao's death at the reunion of our elementary school. Masami and Takao were friends in infancy, and the latter was one of my best friends. He died in Australia in July 2003 soon after moving there with his wife to live near his son's family's.

Masami enclosed a photo in the envelope to me. It was a snapshot of the private exhibition of pictures of the man by the name of Nakajima. In an oil painting at the center of the photo a beautiful lady dancing flamenco in a pink dress and a brown hat was drawn. Masami's letter explains that she was the model for this picture four years ago, that she wanted for me to keep this photo as a reminder of a girl classmate at an elementary school and that she had also wanted very much to show it to Takao.

When I told her about Takao's death, Masami put her hand on mine saying, "Oh, it's sad!" When we were about to part after the reunion, she shook my hand thanking me for my telling about Takao's death. Generally, Japanese women of our age do not show such a Western style of manner. I now understand the reason; she has been practicing flamenco as a hobby for about ten years.

In return to her letter I sent Masami a printed copy of Takao's last e-mail message to me and his wife's that told me about his death, as well as photos of two watercolors I made last year.

The Earliest Christmas Cards from Two Ladies

2004-12-15T09:54:00.000+09:00

Last week I already received two Christmas cards. The senders of these were Eugenia and Jola.

Eugenia is a professor of physics at Moscow State University, and Jola is the late Stan's wife living in London. Eugenia's husband, Volodya, was also a professor of physics, and had been working jointly with her. However, he died some years ago (she wrote me then, "It is so difficult [for] me [to live] without Volodya"). So both Eugenia and Jola happen to be widows. (Don't think that I become friends with widows only!)

Eugenia wrote nothing new in her card. The card were decorated with bright powders, many of which were pealed off from the card on my opening the envelope and dropped on the desk and the floor. I do not like this type of card, so that I trashed hers instantly. Sorry Eugenia, but don't send me such a kind!

Jola's card usually comes first, but was the second this year. Her husband was the head of the radiation section at the London Hospital, and his research was closely related to mine.

Jola wrote in her card the followings: She retired from dentistry and now travels a lot. She was in Thailand the week before and may be in Japan in the future. Four years ago she got a degree at the London University in Egyptology. Her son and his wife retired last year at 48 and live in Spain. -- They live such interesting lives as are rare in our country. --

God bless the two ladies!

The Girl of Masculine Spirit

2004-12-07T20:41:00.002+09:00

I made a search of the name H. I. at the Google Web site to learn her recent activity. She was a classmate of mine at an elementary school in Kanazawa, and now works at the University of California, Santa Barbara, U.S.A. I have not heard from her these years. There were a considerable number of hits for the search. Among them I found a review [1] of John Nathan's book [2]. Under the title of the review, the Editor writes this note:

Associate professor of Japanese H. I. was incorrectly referred to as "he." H. I. is a woman.

This note refers to the following passage of the review (italics by the present author):

H. I., UCSB associate professor of Japanese, has been a colleague of Nathan for 30 years, and he said the book offers a unique and much needed insight into the culture itself.

Which was this "he," a typos or the reviewer's actual impression of her? I believe that the latter is the case. H. I. was a girl of masculine spirit, as she always admitted herself. She had even a masculine look when I met her five years ago. Thus the Editor did not correct the reviewer's text, but wrote a note instead. Humorous treatment!

K. Richer, "Book Probes Japan's History, Culture" Daily Nexus Online (February 18, 2004). [Note added later: The page became unavailable.]
J. Nathan, "Japan Unbound: A Volatile Nation's Quest for Pride and Purpose" (Houghton Mifflin, 2004).

"Italian, Please"

2004-11-29T15:55:00.000+09:00

Mr. K, a former colleague of mine, told me the following story.

One day K and some of his friends went to a restaurant and enjoyed a talk over supper. Then they wanted to have more talks, and moved to another shop where drinks and light meals were served.

All of them wished to have a cup of coffee. The kind of coffee many Japanese people like is "American." K's friends ordered American, but he wanted to have something different. He said jokingly to the waiter, "Italian, please." The waiter said, "OK," and went away.

K was rather surprised to know that they served Italian coffee there, and expected espresso or something like that to come.

After a while, the waiter came with a big dish of spaghetti for K. K was quite at a loss how to do with it after eating an enough amount of supper already.

This is a favorite story of mine to tell to my friends when I have coffee with them.

"This is Hyogo!"

2004-10-31T14:28:00.002+09:00

The countryside of Shiota Spa, Hyogo (17 October 2003).

The countryside of Yunogo Spa, Okayama (18 October 2003).

Past February Indra Das, a friend of mine working at the University of Pennsylvania, came to Hyogo Ion Beam Medical Center in Harima Science Garden City, Hyogo, Japan. He looked at the accelerator installed there and did some experimental work with it.

In the evening before his return to USA, he and I met in Osaka and had a chat over supper. I took two sketchbooks with me to show him the small works I made during my trip to Italy and New Zealand.

The sketchbook I used in Italy included some works from domestic trips. When I opened the page of a sketch made in Shiota Spa (the upper picture), Indra instantly said to my surprise, "This is Hyogo!" Sure, Shiota Spa is located in Hyogo. The scenery sketched seems to be very similar to the one he used to see during his stay at the Medical Center.

Comics

2004-10-17T11:52:00.000+09:00

The blogger Obachan writes a good series of essay on Japanese comics (manga) [1,2]. On its first piece I wrote the following comment:

As one of the Japanese I applaud your essays that introduce Japanese culture on the Internet. Possibly you'd rather want to hear comments from overseas readers. So I'll make my comment short. Actually I, born before the World War II, seldom read manga so that I have little to write about this topic. In my childhood, however, I enjoyed the manga Norakuro. (Note: Norakuro is the hero's name meaning "the black, stray dog.") It depicted the military life by the use of humanoid dogs. Those dogs were very humane, suggesting that the author Suiho Tagawa (1899—1989) did not like wars at the deep part of his mind in those days of militarism.

Obachan replied:

Thank you for your comment! Yes, I know Norakuro. I have read only a few episodes so I don't know this manga very well, but I, too, had the impression that the author did not like the war. I also read somewhere that Osamu Tezuka respected Suiho Tagawa very much as his predecessor.

Osamu Tezuka (1928—1989) is the famous author of comics about whom Obachan writes in the first piece of her essay. One of Tezuka's representative works is Tetsuwan Atomu (Atom with iron arms), the hero of which is the charming robot of the name Atomu. Tezuka contributed much to make manga one of unique cultures of Japan, as Obachan told us.

Another manga I liked to read in my boyhood was Fukujiro Yokoi's Putcher in Wonderland. It is SF manga, in which the boy Putcher and his robot friend Beri experience adventures of encountering Martians and the underground mankind, fight against those creatures, and finally establish peaceful relations with them. I had forgotten the story, but a website [3] reminded me of it.

That manga was published as a serial in the journal Shonen Kurabu (Boys' Club) after the World War II, from 1946 to 1948 [3]. It was my junior high school days, and our young teacher of science said to us, "I don't recommend you to read manga, but Pitcher Putcher is an exception." On hearing the teacher's wrong citation of the title, some boys including me laughed secretly, and were proud of being regular readers of that manga.

I have to write also about the manga author Machiko Hasegawa (1920—1992), who learned the making of manga from Suiho Tagawa and was awarded the Prize for Honorable National in 1992 (the first winner of this prize was the home-run hitter Sadaharu Oh). Hasegawa's representative work is Sazae-san (Ms. Sazae). It is a comic strip dealing with the three-generation family Isono, in which Sazae is an active woman of the second generation. The strip first appeared in The Evening Fukunichi in 1946, moved to The Asahi-shimbun in 1949, and continued for 25 years in the latter newspaper.

One day when I was a graduate student, I saw the following strip of Sazae-san, in which no person of Isono family appeared: A thief of a scaring look stealthily comes into a house. In an empty room he takes out one of books from a bookshelf. Then he read it with a pleased smile. The last scene shows a corner of the street, where a sign with the words "Reading Week" stands.

The words "Reading Week" in Japanese consist of four Chinese characters. Hasegawa used the very difficult, original style character for the first one and a simplified style for the last. I disliked such loose use of Chinese characters. So, I sent a letter to her, writing like this:

I enjoyed your comic strip about Reading Week very much. However, I advise you consistently to use Chinese characters designated for daily use by the Cabinet. Many children read your strips, so that you have to be careful about their educational effects.

I got no reply from Hasegawa. I believe however that she highly valued my advice, because I never saw her loose use of Chinese characters in Sazae-san after that. She must have been just before her forties at that time.

Japanese Manga (Comics) -1- (2004).

Japanese manga (Comics) -2- (2004).

What is Putcher? (2000) (in Japanese).

My Favorite Suit

2004-09-26T08:05:00.000+09:00

The other day, I was walking in a brown suit. Then an ex-pilot of the U.S. Navy spoke to me, saying, "General, don't you go to Iraq?" (Read details in a recent story of my "Femto-Essay" site.) It seems that he thought me in that suit to be a high-rank officer of the Self-Defense Force of Japan. There are more stories about this brown suit.

It was August 1979. I visited National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada, in that suit. (I use the suit for so many years, less than a few times per year.) There I saw Dr. K. W. Geiger, a son of Hans Wilhelm Geiger. -- The German physicist H. W. Geiger (1882—1945) is famous for the development of the Geiger—Müller counter to measure radioactivity. -- K. W. Geiger wore completely the same suit as mine. He said, "This was made in Korea." I said, "Oh, no! I bought this in Japan." Then I checked my suit and found the words, "Made in Korea." I had to say, "Oh, I didn't know this had been made in Korea."

Some years later, I went to Tokyo in that suit. A foreign lady stopped me at the Yaesu entrance hall of the Tokyo station, and asked me a donation or something like that in Japanese. I rejected her request in English. Then she said in English, "You look nice!" (So, I like that suit). However, I didn't change my answer to her. -- An old fox is not easily snared. --

Note added later: Hearing this story, a lady friend of mine said to me, "It can be amusing for a man that another person is in the same suit, but for a woman it would be a serious problem. Women pursue originality in their dresses." Sure!

Talking about Spirits Is Scientific

2004-09-20T20:15:00.000+09:00

A blog friend of mine, who nicknamed herself obachan (a Japanese word to mean middle-aged woman), recently wrote on her web page as follows [1]:

[My grandma] strictly made me finish the rice, literally all -- without leaving any single grain in the bowl. According to her, there were gods (or spirits of nature) living in rice, so we should never throw them away.

My wife's and my own mother possibly belonged to the same generation as her grandma, and they also taught us to eat rice to the last grain. Regrettably, however, we did not tell our daughters about the spirits in rice. As a result, they do not share with us that good habit about eating rice. I thought that my wife and I were too scientific to talk about spirits. However, I happened to find the following passage in a book written by F. David Peat [2]:

Indigenous science also teaches that corn is the manifestation of something deeper, of something that transcends the particular individual plant and links all corn together -- in this case spirit.

Then Peat describes that the spirits of corn and Native American people had a form of mutually supportive relationship. Corn would grow in response to a request that it should feed the people; and in turn the people acknowledge the power of the plant and care for it in special ways. This represents indigenous science. It moves slowly. On the other hand, genetic engineering of Western science today is impressive, but, Peat criticizes, scientists don't really understand what they are doing to the general ecology.

Speaking of spirits might have been more scientific. I'm not joking here.

"108 Gods in Salad" in "Obachan's Kitchen & Balcony Garden" (2004).

F. David Peat, "Blackfoot Physics: A Journey into the Native American Universe" (Fourth Estate, London, 1995).

Related Site Added Later

National Museum of the American Indian (Opened September 21, 2004, in Washington, D.C.).

Frogs or Flags?

2004-08-31T07:35:00.000+09:00

Past April I made my first trip to Shikoku, and found the street name "Hata" in the city of Kochi. "Hata" means, "Flags (are) plenty (here)," and is expressed by two Chinese characters. The faithful pronunciation of the characters would be "Hatata." Two ta's must have been shortened to a single ta.

My last name "Tabata" is expressed by the same two characters as those of Hata put in the reverse order. I say to the overseas friends of mine, "My last name means many flags." The flags of Hata and Tabata are of a vertically long kind (nobori-bata) such as used by samurai in wars. I suppose that many samurai of the Taira clan (Heike) secretly lived in Hata after being beaten by the Minamoto clan (Genji) in 1185 in a naval battle at Dannoura.

Possibly my last name comes from the fact that my father-side ancestors were fishermen, not samurai, in a village facing the Japan Sea. They must have come back from fishing with many flags on the boat when they got much fish.

On hearing the explanation of my last name, some friends of mine ask me which I mean, frogs or flags, because my English pronunciation is poor. I say, "Stars and Stripes is the American flag. That flag!" Once I said this to a British friend of mine. I should have referred to Union Jack.

(Modified from my comment on "Another Typhoon" posted at the website "Obachan's Scribbles")

Physics of Stone Skipping

2004-01-29T20:24:00.000+09:00

In January 2004, my wife and I joined a 13-day travel to New Zealand organized by JTB West. It included a two-day visit to Moeraki in the heart of South West New Zealand World Heritage Area. In the morning of the second day in Moeraki, the local guide Andy brought us to Monro Beach facing the Tasman Sea. There he often played stone skipping picking up flat and circular pebbles.

I said to Andy, "To get the maximum number of bounces, you had better give maximum spin to the stone and throw it so as to make the attack angle between the stone and the water surface 20 degrees. Do you know the world record of stone skipping?" He did not know the world record. I told him that it was 38 rebounds.

I learned all these things about stone skipping just before going on the travel. It was from the article entitled "Secrets of successful stone-skipping" and written by the French scientists Christophe Clanet, Fabien Hersen and Lydéric Bocquet [1].

However, a different set of experiments would be necessary to find the optimum throwing for Andy's stone skipping. The wave of the Tasman Sea was rather large, so that Andy was throwing stones not directly to the sea but to the region of the wet sandy beach from which the wave had just retreated. The stones rebounded five or six times on the sands and then on water!

C. Clanet, F. Hersen and L. Bocquet, Nature Vol. 427, p. 29 (2004).

Another Statistical Study on Right and Left

2003-09-09T19:46:00.000+09:00

In an earlier story of this collection of essays, I introduced a psychologist's statistical study on the side of a pair's turning of their head in kissing. Amar Klar of the National Cancer Institute in Maryland, USA, made another statistical study on right and left.

According to an article in Nature Science Update [1], Klar secretly inspected people's top of the head by spying on them in airports and shopping malls, ignoring the longhaired and the bald. He found the followings [2]: More than 95% of right-handers' hair whorled clockwise on the scalp and that the locks of lefties and the ambidextrous are equally likely to coil either way.

I write with the right hand, use a driver and some other tools with the left hand, and have a pair of whorls curing clockwise and anticlockwise. This is quite consistent with Klar's reuslt.

Klar is reported to have said, "A single gene with either 'right' or 'random' forms might underlie the trend. People with one or two copies of the right version would be right-handed, with clockwise hair; those with two random versions would split 50/50 for handedness and hair whorls." He is now seeking such a gene.

The article also says: Left-handed or ambidextrous people are more likely to store language in the right side of the brain, are more prone to schizophrenia and, anecdotally, are more often creative or even geniuses. -- Oh, I'm prone to schizophrenia or may be a genius! --

"Handedness equals hairstyle: One gene might control both - and explain the divided brain," Nature Science Update, Sep. 4 2003.
A. J. S. Klar, "Human handedness and scalp hair whorl direction develop from a common genetic mechanism," Genetics, in press (2003).

Typo or True Value?

2003-03-25T19:52:00.000+09:00

In the evening edition of the Asahi dated February 27, 2003, an article about the Akutagawa Prize appeared. This prize is the most prestigious literature award in Japan. The article read:

The presentation ceremony of the 128th Akutagawa Prize (sponsored by Japan Association for Literature Promotion) was held in Tokyo on February 21, and Ms. Tamaki Daido received the main reward of a watch and the prize money of 100 yens. ...

Imagining the scene of Ms. Daido getting a 100-yen coin (about 80 cents) respectfully, I laughed and laughed. The next evening’s Asahi carried a correction to rectify the amount to 1 million yens. It is 100-man yens in Japanese expression; man (ten thousands) is denoted by a single Chinese character. So the dropping of that one character causes a large difference.

The article in the Asahi also told about the following words of Senji Kuroi, a member of the Nomination Committee of the Akutagawa Prize, to praise the Prize-winning work "Shoppai Doraibu" (Salty Driving):

The method of composing this work is stable, and the work has a firm structure. It well conveys the feeling of the heroine I, who is attracted by both a middle-aged man and the star actor of a local theatrical troupe. ...

The work was later published in book form, and the review of it appeared in the Asahi of March 23, 2003. The reviewer Atsushi Onoya wrote:

[This work] has no climax, no surprise ending, nor any meaning. ... Readers should not wrongly think that such is one of the top works of literature. ...

This is one of the most scathing book reviews I have ever read. If this were a right appraisal of the work, the prize money of 100 yens would have been appropriate. The evaluation of literary works seems to be a difficult thing.

Asymmetry in Kissing

2003-02-16T20:00:00.000+09:00

I found an interesting research report in Nature. It includes a photo of Auguste Rodin's masterpiece The Kiss, in which a couple is kissing by turning their heads to the right. The author of the report is Onur Güntürkün, a psychologist at the University of Ruhr. What do you think is the theme of this report?

The title of the report [1] is "Adult persistence of head-turning asymmetry." Other authors found earlier that humans preferred to turn the head to the right for the final weeks of the fetus and for the first six months after birth. Güntürkün has found that this head motor bias persists into adulthood.

Güntürkün observed 124 kissing couples in public places in the United States, Germany and Turkey. The result shows that 80 pairs (64.6%) turned their head to the right and that 44 (35.5%) turned to the left. This indicates the significant head-turning bias towards the right side, just like fetuses and newborns.

Which side do you turn your heads in kissing, to the right or to the left? Do you want to check it right now?

O. Güntürkün, Nature, Vol. 421, 711 (2003); addendum, ibid., Vol. 421, 711 (2003); See also S. Graham, “Kissing the right way,” Sci. Amer. News 13 Feb (2003)

Relay Composition

2003-01-27T11:03:00.000+09:00

In my childhood I played a word play, "Someone did something with some other one . . ." It needs a plural number of participants. Each participant writes "Someone," "did something," "with some other one," "at some place," and "at some time" on separate sheets of paper by putting concrete expressions for "some . . ." as he or she likes.

Then all the sheets of "Someone" are mixed, all the sheets of "did something" are mixed, and so on. Each participant randomly choose a sheet of "Someone," a sheet of "did something," and so on, and reads them aloud. A set of sheets thus chosen often gives a wild story.

An extended version of the above play is "relay composition." I also played it in student days. In this play, each of several participants reads only one paragraph written just before and adds one paragraph. The story completed can be quite funny.

When I played relay composition during a New Year vacation, a friend of mine with the nickname of Sam wrote a good final paragraph. I still remember its plot after more than 40 years. I do not remember earlier five paragraphs written by participants other than Sam (including my own), but in essence those must have been something like this:

Jack and Betty lived in K City and were good friends. After graduating from a university, Jack got a job at another city. It was far from K City, and Jack had to move there. Betty was going to be lonely.

What do you write after this, if you are requested to conclude the above story? Sam's final paragraph was as follows:

On the day of his removal, Jack got a card from Betty. It read, "I'm going to move, too. My new address is 1-2 S Street, T City." Jack wanted to take a walk to relax from the work of removal. Outside the gate of his new house, he looked back to see the nameplate. It read, "1-2 S Street . . ."

This is so witty a plot just made for a game, isn't it? Regrettably Sam died several years ago.

The Logic of Love

2003-01-09T11:16:00.000+09:00

Assume that the statement

A is B.

is true. Then the statement

"Not A" is "not B."

is called the obverse of the original statement. The obverse is not always true. Interchanging the subject and the predicate of the obverse, we get another statement

"Not B" is "not A."

This statement is called the contraposition of the original statement. The contraposition is always true.

I learned the above logic from a young lady teacher of mathematics in the first year of senior high school. So I remember it well. However, you can understand it easily by drawing a small circle enclosed in a large circle and supposing that the inside of the small circle is A and that the inside of the large circle is B.

In the previous story A Mathematician's Desire, I mentioned about a comical essay written by the mathematician Masahiko Fujiwara. I found another short essay [1] of his that treated the obverse to be quite funny. The essay is entitled: Is ' "Not A" is "not B" ' true?

Without using jargons, Professor Fujiwara teaches the reader that the obverse is false in many cases, but can be true in some cases. He does this by the use of interesting examples. Examples of the false obverse are given by the original statements of daily observation, “The tulip is beautiful," "Snow is white," and "What bothers others is what you must not do." An example of the true obverse is given by the mathematical original statement, "If the polygon is the triangle, then the sum of its inner angles is equal to 180 degrees."

Finally the mathematician gives an example of the obverse that can be decided neither true nor false. The original statement of this example is "If the woman is your wife, then you may love her." He writes:

As for the statement, "If the woman is not your wife, then you must not love her," my wife's opinion and mine are different.

I guess that Professor Fujiwara is actually a good husband as well as a good teacher.

M. Fujiwara, Asahi-Shimbun, Evening Edition (17 Dec. 2002).

Young Ladies' Conversation

2002-08-24T19:26:00.000+09:00

One day in early autumn about 20 years ago, I was on a bus. Then a conversation between two young ladies was heard. One of them said, "I went camping this summer with our group." The other said, "So, you were seen naked by lads, weren't you?" The first lady replied, "Maybe. In the morning a lad pointed his front side and said to me, 'Look at this. This is the proof of my vigor.'" And both of them chuckled.

Having no experience of camping, I do not know why lads can see ladies naked in camping. Anyway, I thought that this was not the kind of talk to be made in the public vehicle. The ladies' voices were however so fresh and innocent that I liked their conversation after all. When autumn comes, I often remind myself of that private talk between the nymphets.

A Mathematician's Desire

2002-08-18T19:41:00.000+09:00

In the 15-Aug evening issue of Asahi-shimbun, the mathematician and essayist Masahiko Fujiwara writes a comical essay entitled "Odoriko Motomu (A dancer wanted)". When his mathematical work comes to a difficulty, he goes on a trip as he pleases. During those trips he wishes to meet such a lady as the heroine dancer in the Nobel-Prize winning writer Kawabata Yasunari's novel, "Izu-no-odoriko (The dancer of Izu)". The hero of the novel, a high school student, found the dancer crying without being able to say him "Good-bye".

Prof. Fujiwara writes that the lady whom he wishes to encounter is not necessarily be a dancer but that it is important for her to cry without being able to say "Good-bye." His desire was intensified because his wife got love letters from an English gentleman. However, the desire has never come true, and thus he has lost hope for its realization a little.

Everyman possibly has a similar desire of having a romantic adventure on a trip, but no one can write about it with an excellent sense of humor like Prof. Fujiwara. I am only afraid that as a result of that essay he might get so many letters from ladies who want to be a dancer for him.

I have memories of some young ladies with whom I talked on the train during my trips in younger days. A physics student going to get an exam for the grauate course, an office lady of Hiroshima, a mysterious lady who majored in English literature, . . . I do not think that they remember me. Each one of them and I enjoyed our conversation to some extent, but said simply "Good-bye" to each other when we took off the train.

The Spinning Egg Rises

2002-04-25T19:49:00.000+09:00

Scientists theoretically explained the paradoxical behavior of a hard-boiled egg: if it is spun with its axis of symmetry horizontal, this axis will rise from the horizontal to the vertical, raising the center of gravity. -- This is not a joke. See the reference [1]. -- They traced the essential mechanism to the action of the frictional force between the spinning object and the table. Their paper was referred to in a column of a Japanese newspaper [2]. A non-scientist friend of mine read the column, and told me that she wished to experiment. I noticed the original paper before, but did not think to experiment by myself. She had more of a scientist's mind than me.

Being stimulated by her words, I tried to rotate a boiled egg on the floor. It seemed difficult to make the egg rotate fast enough around its axis of symmetry put horizontally to cause rising. Starting from rotation around the axis a little off the vertical, however, I could see the axis rising and becoming just vertical. This is wonderful enough. I heard that the friend had also succeeded in observing the odd motion of the egg. She added that she had been quite thrilled when the axis became vertical.

The scientists also write why a raw egg does not show the same behavior. It is because the angular velocity imparted to the shell diffuses into the fluid interior; this process dissipates most of the initial kinetic energy imparted to the egg, making the remaining energy insufficient for the condition of gyroscopic balance to be established. This is a type of research Torahiko Terada (Japanese physicist, astronomer and essayist. Professor of Tokyo University. 1878 - 1935; see a portrait) would have liked.

H. K. Moffatt and Y. Shimomura, "Spinning eggs -- a paradox resolved," Nature Vol. 416, pp. 385-386 (2002).

Y. Uchiyama, "Self-rising boiled eggs," Asahi-Shimbun, 22 Apr., p. 23, (2002).

Narcissus and Immunology

2002-04-21T19:56:00.000+09:00

The cover of the Science magazine issued on 12 April 2002 shows Narcissus gazing at his reflection, as depicted by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573 - 1610). This picture is used for the special section "Reflections on self: Immunity and beyond." The following explanation is given on the contents page of the issue:

As the story from Greek mythology reminds us, and as discussed in this issue, effective recognition of self is important to general survival and to successful immune surveillance, reproduction, community structure, and philosophical integration of the individual.

Reading the above explanation, I thought that "effective recognition of self" meant narcissism, because Narcissus highly valued his own reflection. Then the special section seems to say that narcissism is good for a biological reason. Is this right? The introductory article of the section, "Self-discrimination, a life and death issue" written by Stephen J. Simpson and Pamela J. Hines, however made me notice that my thought was wrong.

Narcissus could not notice that his reflection was his own image, and fall in love with it. However, he was unable to be loved by it, was exhausted and died. So what he did was not the effective recognition of self, but non-recognition of self as such. To work well the immune system has to know which are the cells of own body and which are not. This is what is meant by "effective recognition of self." -- Caravaggio's painting was not cited to praise narcissism. --

Two Kinds of Joy: About Hawking's Birthday Talk

2002-03-08T20:06:00.000+09:00

The British physicist and astronomer Stephen William Hawking is considered to be the greatest theorist of the latter twenties century. He is especially known for his theories on black holes and the origin and evolution of the universe [1]. To celebrate his 60th birthday, a workshop and symposium were held in Cambridge from 7 to 11 January 2002 [2].

Hawking delivered the final talk of the meeting. The title of his talk was "60 Years in a Nutshell," a humorous modification of the title of his recent book [3]. The talk consists of four parts:

Student Days
Expanding Universe
Singularities
Black Holes
Ultimate Theory?

At the end of the talk, the great cosmologist says, " There's nothing like the Eureka moment of discovering something that no one knew before. I won't compare it to sex, but it lasts longer." While saying that he would not do so, Hawking compares the two kinds of joy. Surely, the joy of discovering scientific truth would last long. However, there would be a different theory about the time length of the other kind of joy, wouldn't there?

"The New York Public Library Science Desk Reference," P. Barnes-Svarney ed. (MacMillan, New York, 1995).

G. W. Gibbons and E. P. S. Shellard, Science, Vol. 295, 1476 (2002).

S. Hawking, "The Universe in a Nutshell" (Bantam, New York, 2001).

"I Was Destined to Write ..."

2001-08-24T20:18:00.000+09:00

The cover of Marcia Bartusiak's book, "Einstein's Unfinished Symphony." Clicking the image leads you to the buying information page of the book at Amazon.com web site.

I have been submitting customer reviews on books to Amazon.com since August 2000 (see "Book Reviews by tttabata"). The 21st review was on Marcia Bartusiak's "Einstein's Unfinished Symphony." This book elegantly portrays the hunting for gravitational waves, the existence of which was predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. Immediately after my review had been posted at the Amazon web site, I received unexpectedly an e-mail message of thanks from the author.

I found it interesting that the author uses "bar2siak" for her e-mail account. The original detector invented by Joseph Weber for directly catching gravity waves consisted of a big aluminum cylinder surrounded by piezoelectric sensors and suspended in a vacuum tank. This type of detector is called "bar." Further, a pair of bars is commonly used to cancel noises out by the coincidence method. Thus "bar2" can be interpreted as two bars used for trying to detect gravity waves and described in detail in "Einstein's Unfinished Symphony." Wondering if she had noticed it herself, I wrote this finding of mine to the author.

Ms. Bartusiak wrote me back:

I never thought of my e-mail address in that way. You're right! I guess I was destined to write on gravitational-wave bars after all.

It is again interesting that the science journalist used the religious word "destined."

The writer acknowledges Ms. Bartusiak's kind permission for citing the above passage from her e-mail letter.