In 1953, the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics held its International Conference of Theoretical Physics in Japan as part of an effort to re-integrate Japanese physicists into the global scientific community following the Second World War. While preparing the program for the meeting, Japanese physicists encountered a problem: how to translate the name of one of their major fields of research into English. That field was Busseiron, sometimes described as equivalent to solid-state physics.

In a new article in Isis, Hiroto Kono, a curator and researcher at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Japan, shows how that translation is both too narrow and too static. In fact, any translation would obscure the place of the Busseiron concept in the evolution of a uniquely Japanese scientific physics discipline, one with no immediate Western equivalent.

What’s in a name?

Kono traces the history of the term Busseiron from the 19th century through the 1950s. The word is composed of the characters Butsu, meaning substance or matter, Sei, meaning property or characteristic, and Ron, a theory, discourse, or study. Literally, it is the study of the properties of matter. Early on, Busseiron was used in its broad, literal sense. An 1872 textbook, for example, contained a section on Busseiron which was essentially a digest of foreign educational texts on the properties of matter generally.

As Japanese physics professionalized in the years following the First World War, research topics falling under that heading diversified, including through advances made in quantum theory. By 1942, a young scientist named Hidetosi Takahashi at Tokyo Imperial University published a review article identifying a new trend in physics research studying the macroscopic properties of matter through a statistical mechanical and quantum mechanical lens, which he called “molecular theoretical Busseiron.” Takahashi framed this new trend as a rival to “Soryûshiron,” or “theory of elementary particles,” in terms of their importance to theoretical physics.

Following the publication of Takahashi’s review, this “trend” began to take on a more organized, formal aspect. A colloquium, the Busseiron Kondankai, was organized, and its first meeting held in 1943, where topics including theories of transport phenomena of gases, surface tension of liquids, specific heat of solids, and melting phenomena were discussed. The participants established a journal, Busseiron Kenkyû, the first issue of which was published four months after the meeting. These developments indicated the evolution of Busseiron from an area of scientific interest towards a mature discipline in its own right.

The subsequent development of Busseiron as not just a topic of study but a nascent discipline was, of course, shaped by its wartime context. As Kono notes, “As the war deteriorated, most of the scientists who participated in research and discussion on Busseiron were mobilized for wartime research, and their wartime work, in turn, affected the development of the burgeoning field. Some were able to continue their Busseiron work under wartime research schemes, such as the “Research Neighborhood Group [Kenkyû Tonarigumi],” a research collaboration scheme devised by the Japanese government as a means of mobilizing scientists for wartime research and further exploring certain research topics.” Physicists working under the umbrella of Busseiron began to work on topics like photoemission in photocathodes to develop a device capable of low-light imaging, and materials science focused on oils, thin films, and lubrication.

Defining a field

Following the war, Busseiron retained this expanded focus. Meetings of the Busseiron subgroup of the Physical Society of Japan, formed in 1946, included new topics, including polymers and low-temperature physics. Per Kono, “Thus, Busseiron now included research topics, techniques, and fields that had not been included or even explicitly excluded initially, reflecting developments during wartime. These new elements had developed rather independently but were now aligned under one word.”

By the late 1940s, dedicated Busseiron textbooks began to emerge. The first, entitled Busseiron (2), was published in 1947 and covered, according to co-author Kanetaka Ariyama, “the electron theory of solids related to the conductivity and magnetism in metallic crystals.” Another textbook, published in 1949, described Busseiron as “a discipline that attempts to interpret the properties of matter physically,” and was itself intended “to elucidate the properties of matter as elementarily as possible within the scope of classical physics, based on the knowledge of the structure of matter that has become evident to date.” A more general physics textbook published the same year included a section on Busseiron, which “briefly covers the kinetic molecular theory of gases, crystal structures and the specific heat of solids, the configuration and kinetic state of atoms and molecules in liquids, and the latent heat of fusion.”

These disparate foci reflected the varying interests of the textbooks’ authors. In an effort to provide a more systematic survey of the field, around 1950 a group of Japanese physicists set out to produce a 25-volume book series on Busseiron (of which only five were ultimately published); the series’ supervisor, Shôji Nishikawa described its subject matter as “complex and diverse, extending to chemistry, engineering, and other fields, and yet there is a very marked tendency for what used to be different research fields to gradually develop into a unified and harmonized system from the standpoint of a new Busseiron.” The volumes were to include not only the now-traditional fundamentals of statistical and quantum mechanics as well as various specialized topics, but also introduced gases, liquids, polymers, colloids, and other topics as falling under the heading of Busseiron.

Only in Japan

By that point, Busseiron had expanded to encompass virtually any topic that dealt with properties of matter. Kono observes that, as a result of this, efforts emerged to replace the word with more specific labels at scientific meetings. The field’s flagship journal, Busseiron Kenkyû, was terminated in 1948 (temporarily, as it turned out) and replaced with “a new, more general journal, ‘Kagaku Butsuri [Chemical Physics]’.” The community of Japanese physicists, however, still largely viewed their field as fundamentally a dyad of Busseiron and Soryûshiron, or particle physics.

It was this dyad that defined the organization of the 1953 International Conference of Theoretical Physics, and thus caused that consternation over English translation. As Kono describes it, “While Soryûshiron was given the straightforward translation of ‘theory of elementary particles,’ a direct translation for Busseiron, if it had existed at all, was bypassed, and ‘statistical mechanics and quantum theory of matter’ was adopted as an English rubric for the Busseiron sessions. The Busseiron section consisted of three parts: statistical mechanics (polymers, liquids, transport phenomena, irreversible processes, and general methods in statistical mechanics), molecules and solids (crystal dislocation, molecules, metals, electron theory of intrinsic magnetization, antiferromagnetism and ferromagnetism, magnetic resonance, dielectrics, and color centers), and liquid helium and superconductivity.”

This difficulty in translating the concept to foreign audiences was a topic of conversation at the conference itself, which included a roundtable on “Progress in Busseiron and its Social Background,” which opened with remarks about the issues with the conference program and noted that “only in Japan is there a coherent concept of ‘Busseiron’ that does not exist in other countries.”

Kono’s study of the etymological and institutional history of Busseiron deftly illustrates how scientific disciplines are constituted by their cultural and historical contexts as much as by research topic or methodology. As he observes in his conclusion, “The history of Busseiron was also a story that illuminated how names intervene in the construction and perpetuation of disciplines. Busseiron did not develop strictly within the confines of its early activity; along with its original connotation, its loose definition yet clear dichotomy with Soryûshiron allowed more areas—those that could be related to the study of matter—to be consolidated under its coverage. The lack of corresponding terms in foreign languages barely hindered Busseiron’s popularization and, to the contrary, may have contributed to it by means of a catchy story that promoted the name’s uniqueness. The term, along with the recognition it earned as a discipline, became solidly embedded in Japanese physicists’ nomenclature, from which it is practically impossible to separate.”

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Jon Phillips
American Institute of Physics
jphillips@aip.org

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