Nishina Memorial Lectures

This volume is a collection of Nishina Memorial Lectures delivered by distinguished physicists during the past 50 years at the invitation of the Nishina Memorial Foundation. The Lectures commemorate Yoshio Nishina, the father of modern physics in Japan.

Yoshio Nishina, referred to in Japan as the Father of Modern Physics, is well known for his theoretical work on the Klein-Nishina formula, which was done with Oskar Klein in the 6 years he spent in Copenhagen under Niels Bohr during the great era of the development of quantum physics. As described by Professor Ryogo Kubo in Chap. 2 of this volume, Nishina returned to Tokyo in 1929, and started to build up experimental and theoretical groups at RIKEN. His achievements there were many and great: (1) Encouraging Hideki Yukawa and Sin-itiro Tomonaga to tackle a new frontier of physics, leading eventually to their making breakthroughs in fundamental theoretical physics that won them Nobel prizes; (2) the discovery of "mesotrons" (the name for Yukawa particles at that time, now called muons) in 1937, which was published in Phys. Rev. , parallel to two American groups; (3) construction of small and large cyclotrons and subsequent discoveries of an important radioisotope 237 U and of symmetric ?ssion phenomena by fast neutron irradiation of uranium (1939 - 40), published in Phys. Rev. and Nature; and (4) creation of a new style of research institute, open to external reseachers, an idea inherited from Copenhagen. During World-War-II his laboratory was severely damaged, and also his cyclotrons were destroyed and thrown into Tokyo Bay right after the end of the war.

1. Abstraction in Modern Science
Werner Karl Heisenberg

2. Yoshio Nishina, the Pioneer of Modern Physics in Japan
Ryogo Kubo

3. Tomonaga Sin-Itiro : A Memorial unskip ignorespaces -- Two Shakers of Physics
Julian Schwinger

4. The Discovery of the Parity Violation in Weak Interactions and Its Recent Developments
Chien-Shiung Wu

5. Origins of Life
Freeman J. Dyson

6. The Computing Machines in the Future
Richard P. Feynman

7. Niels Bohr and the Development of Concepts in Nuclear Physics
Ben R. Mottelson

8. From X-Ray to Electron Spectroscopy
Kai Siegbahn

9. Theoretical Paradigms for the Sciences of Complexity
Philip W. Anderson

10. Some Ideas on the Aesthetics of Science
Philip W. Anderson

11. Particle Physics and Cosmology: New Aspects of an Old Relationship
Leon Van Hove

12. The Experimental Discovery of CP Violation
James W. Cronin

13. The Nanometer Age: Challenge and Change
Heinrich Rohrer

14. From Rice to Snow
Pierre-Gilles de Gennes

15. SCIENCE --- A Round Peg in a Square World
Harold Kroto

16. Are We Really Made of Quarks?
Jerome I. Friedman

17. Very Elementary Particle Physics
Martinus J.G. Veltman

18. The Klein-Nishina Formula & Quantum Electrodynamics
Chen Ning Yang

Appendix. List of Nishina Memorial Lectures