Regards Croisés: Yukawa Hideki and John Wheeler at the “Wayside Inn of the Ten Thousand Things”

Abstract

In the period between the late 1940s and the early 1950s, to a large extent in reaction to the proliferation of the “particle zoo”, Yukawa Hideki and John A. Wheeler, in order to develop radically new approaches to physics, looked in their own creative way at the example of Einstein’s general relativity, which they both regarded as his supreme lesson. Far from being a trivial similarity, this affinity in attitude had deeper connections with the development of physics at that time and, not by chance, it became vocal roughly in the years which marked the beginning of the “Renaissance of General Relativity”. But the new paths that Yukawa and Wheeler were trying to carve had also several original features, which make the hitherto unexplored relation between the two of them more intriguing. Yukawa’s attitude toward Einstein’s legacy contributed to the maturation of his ambitious philosophical attempts at reconceptualizing physics, partly inspired by his beloved classics of Chinese and Japanese thought, and also by some considerations of ancient Greek philosophy, as seen from Japan (but keeping an eye on Heisenberg’s contemporary use of it, too). Somehow correspondingly and specularly, Wheeler, during his first trip to Japan in 1953, in order to expose his daring ideas about the status of physics, resorted to an imaginary dialogue between Japanese historical figures and considered calling his new research program “Tokyo program”. Later trips to Japan and China contributed to familiarizing Wheeler a little more with Yukawa’s authors and their outlook (most notably, Taoist cosmology): claiming that he was “influenced” by them would be far-fetched and misleading, but they arguably helped Wheeler perceive some resonances between his and Yukawa’s attempts, which will be reconstructed in this chapter.