71. "Summertime"

The four-Oscar actress Katherine Hepburn^1,2 died on June 29, 2003, at the age of 96. The memorial broadcasting of the 1955 film Summertime³ was made by NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai; Japan Broadcasting Company) on July 4. The Japanese title of this film is Ryojo (Traveler's sentiment). In Japan this film seems to be one of the most popular works of Hepburn. I had just wanted to see it for the third time. The reason is that it was filmed in location in Venice, where I visited in May of this year. After seeing the place with my own eyes and learning some Italian words, I got a new vivid impression from the film. The love story of the film ending in separation was moving even in the third visit.

1. See for an obituary: "Katharine Hepburn dead at 96" (CNN.com, Jun. 30, 2003).
2. See for photos and biography: Katharine Houghton Hepburn
3. A plot synopsis is given: "Summertime" (Britmovie).

14 Jul 03

72. Accurate Painting

There was a piece of news about one of Vincent Van Gogh's famous paintings at the Nature web site.¹ It can be summarized as follows:

Gogh made the work "Moonrise" in a village in France during the summer of 1889 while staying in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in southern France. From the position of the full moon near a cliff shown in the painting, an astronomer Donald Olson of Southwest Texas State University and his colleagues found by calculation² that the exact time of painting was 21:08, July 13. On July 13 this year, which was the 150th anniversary of Gogh's birth, the same scene was seen at the same position; it happens only once every 19 years.

It was a surprise to me that Gogh's painting depicted the scene so accurately to allow the astronomers to make this finding. I had been supposing that Gogh had valued his own impression rather than accuracy in making his works and that he had artistically modified real scenes.

1. "Moon dates Van Gogh," Nature Science Update, 13 June 2003.
2. D. W. Olson, R. L. Doescher, and M. S. Olson, "Dating van Gogh's Moonrise" Sky and Telescope, July, 54-55 (2003).

15 Aug 03

73. Rare Events

Mars and the moon, taken at 21:55, September 8, 2003, in Sakai, Osaka.

H. G. Wells wrote in his 1898 scientific fiction "The War of the World":

I went for a walk with my wife. It was starlight, and I explained the Signs of the Zodiac to her, and pointed out Mars, a bright dot of light creeping zenith-ward, towards which so many telescopes were pointed.

That was the eve of a Martian invasion to Earth in that fiction. In reality, especially many telescopes and naked eyes were pointed toward Mars in the evening of August 27, 2003. This was the occasion of the historical event that Mars and Earth passed closer together than at any time in almost 60,000 years.

The distance of the closest approach of the two planets was 56 million kilometers. The last time the two planets were this close together was in the period when Neanderthals roamed Earth, on September 12, 57,617 BC, to be precise. There will not be another close approach for 284 years.¹

Thus, the event of August 27, 2003, was quite a rare one. In a strict sense, however, everyone's experience on every day is the first happening since the birth of the universe billions of years ago. We must therefore value our daily life and make efforts to live peacefully on this planet without destroying it by wars or ecologically bad effects.

1. "Mars makes close approach to Earth," BBC News, Science/Nature, Aug. 27, 2003.

28 Aug 03

74. Repetition of the Same Error

After a seven-month examination about the cause of the disaster of space shuttle Columbia, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) released its final report on August 26, 2003. The report concluded that a piece of Columbia's foam insulation that had fallen off during launch was indeed to blame. The report also said that NASA had done little to improve shuttle safety since it had lost the shuttle Challenger in 1986, mentioning a space agency bureaucracy compromised by lax safety standards, slipshod management and dwindling funds as significant factors in the disaster.¹

In the report for the Challenger accident, the organizational problems within NASA were also pointed out. In a sense, therefore, the loss of Columbia was the repetition of the same error. Such a repetition can occur only for those who do not carefully learn from experiences. At NASA they should seriously learn from the two disasters and reports to continue the space program. -- I am afraid that in a certain country there are many politicians who do not learn from the history of the aggressive war started by that country. --

Note added later

In the earlier essay of this column entitled "Breaking Up of Columbia" I wished that another Richard Feynman would soon clarify the cause of the Columbia disaster reminding his famous demonstration of an O-ring in ice water in the 1986 Challenger investigation. Actually there was another Feynman in the Columbia investigation.¹ The panelist Douglas Osheroff, a Nobel laureate and a physicist like Feynman, demolished NASA's theory of how the foam broke off the fuel tank doing an experiment with a fairly simple setup.

1. "Concerns raised that changes in NASA won't last," CNN.com, Science & Space, Aug. 26, 2003.
2. "'I think I added something'," Science Vol. 301, No.5638 p. 1300 (2003).

5 Sep 03; Note, 12 Sep 03

75. Better Intelligibility among Non-native Speakers

Some years ago, a professor from Beijing said to me, "The speed of your English speaking is just good for me to understand. So we, non-native English speakers, understand each other better in English than we understand native speakers." I quite agreed with her. However, the reason for easier communication in English among non-native English speakers seems to be not only their speed of speaking but also their accent.

A study related to the above phenomenon was recently reported.¹ Tessa Bent and Ann Bradlow from Northwestern University in Illinois made an experiment with students at an American summer school for learning English.² Their subjects included Chinese, Koreans, Bengalis, Hindi speakers, Japanese, Romanians, Slovakians, Spaniards and Thais, as well as American English speakers. Participants took turns speaking and listening. They were recorded saying simple English phrases such as "The dog came back," and assessed for their intelligibility.

The results showed that non-natives found each other at least as intelligible as native English speakers, regardless of whether they shared a first language. Bent and Bradlow suggest that there may be features of the target language that all non-natives omit.

1. "Accents have advantages: A foreign tongue can be easier to understand in the mouth of a non-native," Nature science Update, Sep. 8, 2003.
2. T. Bent and A. R. Bradlow, "The interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit," Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol. 114, pp. 1600-1610 (2003).

6 Oct 03

76. I've Read Books Written by Two among Three of Them!

The 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics has been shared by three low-temperature theorists for their pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids.¹ The laureates are Alexei A. Abrikosov of Argonne National Laboratory, USA, Vitaly L. Ginzburg of P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute, Russia, and Anthony J. Leggett of the University of Illinois at Urbana, USA.

I have not learned low-temperature physics, but have known all of those names. Possibly I learned the name of Abrikosov from the titles of papers a friend of mine, Professor Kazumi Maki at the University of South California, published when he was young. Kazumi has also made a lot of contributions to the theory of superconductors. So, browsing the titles of his many publications in an abstract journal was a good stimulus to me in my young days.

I learned the names of Ginzburg and Leggett from their books I read more than 15 years ago. Both of them wrote about the important problems of physics yet to be solved.^2,3 They have wonderful perception not only for the field of their own work but also for all the fields of physics. Ginzburg's book even refers to the problems of astrophysics. I liked their books very much, and learned a great deal from these.

Note added later

It is also a possibility that I learned the name of Abrikosov from a good book on low-temperature physics written by Kurt Mendelssohn for lay persons.⁴

1. The Nobel Prize in Physics 2003 (Nobel e-Muesum, 7 Oct 2003).
2. V. L. Ginzburg, "Physics and Astrophysics: A Selection of Key Problems," Translator, O. Glebov; Translation Editor, G. R. ter Haar (Pergamon, Oxford, 1985).
3. A. J. Leggett, "The Problems of Physics" (Oxford University Press, New York, 1987).
4. K. Mendelsohn, "The Quest for Absolute Zero:The Meaning of Low Temperature Physics," 2nd edition (Taylor & Francis, London, 1977)

8 Oct 03

77. Steven Weinberg's Golden Lessons to Students

On the Concepts page of a recent issue of Nature, the Nobel-Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg gives an essay entitled "Four Golden Lessons."¹ These lessons are important pieces of advice to students at the start of their scientific careers. I would like to cite the four items here:

1. No one knows everything, and you don't have to.
2. Go for the messes -- that's where the action is.
3. Get used to spending most of your time not being creative, to being becalmed on the ocean of scientific knowledge.
4. Learn something about the history of science, or at a minimum the history of your own branch of science.