Archive of historical materials
Comment of Referee (Phys. Rev.)
OU1936-C5 (1 page) Date: None
This is the referee’s comment regarding the paper Yukawa submitted to Physical Review, the journal published by the American Physical Society. Based on this comment, Physical Review decided not post Yukawa’s paper.
Yukawa prepared the Dirac field of electrons and the Dirac field of positrons and tried to formulate a theory that would not result in infinite charge when the existing relation between the two fields was imposed. In other words, he attempted to achieve “normal vacuum state” by canceling the infinite charge of the Dirac sea with both the field of electrons and the field of positrons in the negative energy state. The result was expressed in the form of Yukawa’s new density matrix equation [Equation (5)]. The referee claimed that the equation was basically no different from the density matrix equation [Equation (5)’] induced from Dirac’s original theory and concluded that there was no novel achievement. From the viewpoint of today’s quantum field theory, even a small difference between the two is very important. However, the referee did not understand that at that time. After receiving the reply from the Editor of Physical Review, Yukawa sent his rebuttal (OU1936-C7) to the comment of the referee, thoroughly explaining the misunderstandings of the referee. Yukawa’s arguments may not have been convincing at that time because the quantization procedure was not perfected and the concept of charge conjugation was not clarified. See OU1936-C7 concerning this topic. (Written by Yutaka Hosotani)
