Hideki Yukawa

"[After the publication of his 1934 paper proposing meson theory] I felt like a traveler who rests himself at a small tea shop at the top of a mountain slope. At that time I was not thinking about whether there were any more mountains ahead... I do not want to write beyond this point, because those days when I studied relentlessly are nostalgic to me; and on the other hand, I am sad when I think how I have become increasingly preoccupied with matters other than study."

"Yukawa is explicit in acknowledging that the growth of modern science from the seeds sown in Western, mainly Greek, antiquity could not have occurred in the East, given the nature of Eastern, mainly Chinese, ways of thought... Physics, he believes, has moved and will move further in future in directions more in harmony with Eastern thinking."

"Hideki Yukawa's mind throughout his life remained very much an oriental one. We learn that of the ancient Chinese writings that he discovered early in life, the ones that made the greatest and most lasting impression on him were those of Taoism in general and of Chuangtse in particular... this school centre on man's relation with the world of nature, and his oneness with it. ... To Yukawa the awareness of nature in a much more intuitive way than any Westerner would accept as part of scientific thinking appeared to be a vital ingredient in creativity. He felt not only that his own success in moving theoretical physics a step further owed something to this way of thinking, but that an element of it can be seen in such creative acts as Heisenberg's formulation of the uncertainty principle."

"While accepting the fact that his later mental struggles to discern the nature of particles – 'drawing circles on the blackboard', so he relates, being a visible sign of his mental activity – did not lead to any breakthrough, he expresses the conviction that a more oriental approach is a better way to deeper understanding than the present pursuit of ever greater detail with an ever greater mass of facts produced by more and more sophisticated experimentation. To him all this activity produces barriers between the individual scientist and his ability to perceive Nature as a whole."