Learning from Sakata's Physics and Philosophy

Shoichi Sakata gained invaluable and precious insight for his forty-year-long study from ‘Dialektik der Natur’ (Dialectics of Nature) written by Friedrich Engels.1) The ‘Dialektik der Natur’ had been finally published in 1925 in German and Russian despite its major portion is believed to have been written as early as between early 1870’s and 1880’s, going unpublished for years even after Engels’ death in 1895. Sakata read the book as a Konan High School student in its Japanese edition published in 1929 by a graduate of this school, Tadasi Kato. After graduating from the high school, Sakata was enrolled in the Physics Department at Kyoto University and began learning the revolutionary theories of the 20th century, including the relativity theory and the quantum mechanics, which made him aware of the importance of seeing the nature in dialectic ways. He was also influenced by his reading of Lenin’s ‘Materialism and Empiriocriticism’ whose famous sentence he frequently quoted: “Even the electron is inexhaustible as an atom is.”. Sakata draw his insight from the 1932 discovery of the neutron by James Chadwick for the understanding of the structure of atomic nuclei as the composite system of protons and neutrons. In his dissertation for his bachelor’s degree “On the Theory of Nuclei”, he made practical application of the natural dialectic as a method of analyzing the atomic nuclei.