Hideki Yukawa was the first Japanese person to win a Nobel Prize (Physics 1949 "for his prediction of the existence of mesons on the basis of theoretical work on nuclear forces.")
Léon Rosenfeld was a Belgian physicist and close associate of Niels Bohr. In his essay on "Niels Bohr's Contribution to Epistemology", he describes a conversation he had with Yukawa about the challenges of understanding Bohr's theories:
Interestingly, Rosenfeld added that "If Yukawa had also mentioned Plato, his epigram would have given a complete characterization, which it would be difficult to make more pregnant, of this significance of Bohr's contribution to philosophical thought. Untrammeled by formal schooling, guided only by the sure intuition of the investigator of nature, Bohr rediscovered the dialectical process of cognition which had so long been obscured by the unilateral development of epistemology on the basis of Aristotelian logic and Platonic idealism. ... even though scientists of the 19th century who were most inclined to idealism ... were impervious to the Hegelian form of dialectics..."When I was staying at Yukawa's institute in Kyoto 2 years ago [1961], I had occasion to discuss Bohr's ideas with the great Japanese physicist, whose conception of the meson with its complimentary aspects of elementary particle and field of nuclear force is one of the most striking illustrations of the fruitions of the new way of looking at things that we owe to Niels Bohr.
I asked Yukawa whether the Japanese physicists had experienced the same difficulty as their Western colleagues in assimilating the idea of complementarity and in adapting themselves to it.
He answered, "No, Bohr's argumentation has always appeared quite evident to us," and, as I expressed surprise, he added, with his aristocratic smile, "You see, we in Japan have not been corrupted by Aristotle."
From The Selected Papers of Leon Rosenfeld, Chapter 11 "Niels Bohr's Contribution to Epistemology" (1963) p. 522
Hideki Yukawa 湯川 秀樹 (1907 – 1981)
NOTE: Why post about a Japanese physicist in a Chinese Dialectics forum? Because, as Yukawa's remark suggests, he was influenced by the Chinese philosophy of Daoism 道教 & Confucianism 儒家.
