Science: Out of the Night

When the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, no one was more appreciative of the scientific achievement involved than a shy, balding Japanese physicist named Hideki Yukawa. At the time, Yukawa was 200 miles away at Japan’s University of Kyoto. Later, when he arrived in this country, courteous Scientist Yukawa quietly congratulated U.S. nuclear physicists on their scientific achievement.

Actually, as his U.S. colleagues were well aware, Scientist Yukawa was entitled to some congratulations himself. Ten years earlier, when he was a 28-year-old lecturer at Japan’s Osaka University, Yukawa had taken the next step beyond the theory of nuclear fission with his brilliantly propounded theory of the meson. It had taken him more than a year simply to write out the mathematical formula through which he arrived at his conclusion: that a previously unknown type of particle was a clue to the force that held the nucleus of the atom together. Two years later the unknown particle was verified by Dr. Carl D. Anderson in laboratory experiments, and later named “meson.”

Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer brought Yukawa to the U.S. in 1948 to work at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Last spring Columbia University named him visiting professor of physics. One day last week, Yukawa dismissed his class for the day and reported to the office of Columbia’s President Dwight Eisenhower. There he received a warm handshake and hearty congratulations. At 42, Hideki Yukawa had become the first of his countrymen to win a Nobel Prize. The $30,000 prize in physics was awarded for the theory Yukawa had propounded 14 years ago. (The Nobel Prize in chemistry went to University of California Professor William F. Giauque —pronounced Gee-oke—for his studies in the behavior of matter at very low temperatures.)

A reporter asked Professor Yukawa how he had conceived the meson theory. Said he:

“Well, it is very curious. When one works in daytime, it is easy to do your regular work. You have your desk, your paper convenient. But it is hard in daytime to get something that is completely different from conventional notions. So I used to work hard all day and get very tired and nervous. Then I could not sleep at night. Sometimes at night I thought of very interesting things. Almost always, in the morning, these things turned out to be untrue. But once in a great while one of them was true and unusual. This was the way, at night, that I thought of the meson theory.”