When the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, no one was more appreciative of the scientific achievement involved than a shy, balding Japanese physicist named Hideki Yukawa. At the time, Yukawa was 200 miles away at Japan's University of Kyoto. Later, when he arrived in this country, courteous Scientist Yukawa quietly congratulated U.S. nuclear physicists on their scientific achievement.
Actually, as his U.S. colleagues were well aware, Scientist Yukawa was entitled to some congratulations himself. Ten years earlier, when he was a 28-year-old lecturer at Japan's Osaka University, Yukawa had taken the next step beyond the theory of nuclear...