After supper I took up my physics again, but at last I gave up. Ill-starred work indeed! … Recently I have felt very sad without any reason, so I went to a film. … Returning home I read a book on physics. I don’t understand it very well. … Why isn’t nature clearer and more directly comprehensible? … As I went on with the calculation, I found the integral diverged – was infinite. After lunch I went for a walk. The air was astringently cold. … All of us stand on the dividing line from which the future is invisible. We need not be too anxious about the results, even though they may turn out quite different from what you expect.
– Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, quoted in James Gleick, Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics, Abacus, London, 2006, p. 260
It reminds me of the voluptuous and aesthetic ennui of aristocrats and nihilists belonging to the Russian military, at fin de siècle, posted to the provinces, the starched uniforms making it difficult to recline, the insupportable humidity in summer and in winter the boring isolation of an infinity of mute snow fields, deep-ploughing, beech woods and the further infinity of the steppes.
– Tomonaga sketch by Jutta Waloschek, my inversion, found here
Sin-Itiro Tomonaga (1906-1979), Julian Schwinger (1918-1994) and Richard Feynman (1918-1988) were together – each received a third – awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 “for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles.”
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