 It appears to me there are two different ways that I can live that an age where I must choose. There is a way of my mother. It leads for me through a green world that one can know and understand and goes back surely to the land where I was born and back still further back through all the growing centuries of Japan. This is a way of my home that is already new as I said and leads forward into a time that is not yet here and I don't play somewhere ahead and it is filled with many things that now exist only in the minds of men. Of such a man, for instance, as my father. His name is Dr. Yukawa. He is a person who perhaps some may know. It is said that Dr. Yukawa is a man of great wisdom and this must surely be true to fall where he has gone by thinking one must use a great machine, an atom, so that my father can have a look and to open up a place so small they must use the world's most powerful instruments. In a place my father expects with the help of a mother. The cosmetron enables us to see what happens within the nucleus of the atom. All this does the work, so to speak, of an anvil. Out of this generator comes the hammer, a large number of protons. The hammer is turned into this magnetic circle. It is whirled faster and faster around. A radio frequency system increases the speed. The element we wish to study is inserted here. A block of carbon perhaps. And the proton hammers hit. The nucleus of the element is shattered. The anvil's work is done. In a gas-filled cloud chamber such as this, the particles that fly off leave a trail of vapor. The way an airplane leaves a trail sometimes high in the sky. These can be photographed. And so we have a record of the event. Something to think about. My father did not take the time to explain some very interesting details. The large number of protons he mentioned, they amount to one thousand billion. This number is delivered from the injector in one hundred thousandths of a second. They are speeded up by a shock of two billion volts. That's five times as much energy as man has ever before been able to produce. These revolving protons are whipped up to very nearly the speed of light. They complete this circle three million times. That's five times around the Earth in this length of time. One second. This happens again and again. Twenty times something like this, as my father told you, that gives him something to think about. For my father to think. That's what he does, the way he works. He's been at it as long as I can remember. Now, no matter how far back I go, even to my earliest days in Kyoto where I was born, during all the years in the house where I grew up, the strongest memory of my father is always the same. Man of by himself, not to be disturbed, he had chosen his way long before my time. Even as a schoolboy at the Kyogoku Elementary School, here already he was attracted to the work of mathematics. And by the time he came to the Kyoto Rakuhoku Upper Secondary School, he already determined to become a physicist. Kyoto University is a college of my father. He trained there in the old laboratories. Now he has brought to his college a new physics building of which he is the director. There are many books that have grown out of all the thinking that has been done by my father and his colleagues. I was born the same year, the theory of the lesson first went down on paper, no family. A new paper was sure to be on its way about electrons, cosmic rays and mesotrons, about nuclear transformations and only the most difficult matters, until papers were not enough. And man came from all over the world to Japan to hear what my father was thinking. He received many invitations to return these visits. And so he had to leave Kyoto and the house where he grew up and all the familiar surroundings of his student days. He left the place of his birth, the city of Tokyo as well, where God marks the spot he was born. The Yukawa had to leave Japan and travel out into the world. To many of all the places where his ideas had already gone, he now followed after. He was discussed by the students of the great universities and in Princeton too in New Jersey, in the eastern part of the United States. Well, it exceeded the whole thing. Who said so? A fellow by the name of Yukawa, Japanese, smart brother. What does this thing do? Well, it holds the nucleus of the atom together. Now, for example, suppose you had a neutron here. No, look, let's look at it this way. Here's an atom, nucleus, proton, neutron. What's the relationship between them? None that's been known law of physics, but there had to be something. Yukawa figured out mathematically that the relationship required some third particle, the meson. It set up a field that holds the two of them together. According to his figures, it just had to be there. By heavens, two years later they found it. How? Like I said, by the heavens and cosmic rays. A fellow by the name of Anderson got photographs of some rays later. There they were, that's all. It was here at Princeton that my father was invited to bring around his family and to stay for a year or more to the Institute for Advanced Studies where many scientists come from far places in order to think. Here at the Institute, the great professors can talk as well as think. This must be a help to find someone like yourself you can talk to. Because these doctors of theoretical science, man like Einstein of Germany, and Yukawa of Japan, Guerra of the United States, and Baba of India, they cannot discuss their work with everyone. Only a small few would understand. They have a special language, and so they can speak only to each other whenever they happen to meet. But little as any of us do understand, it is most proper I consider that we listen to these men. The questions they raise are most important to us all. Many years may go by before the answers will be found. But the big questions they ask, these already give the shape of how it will be for everything that lives. It was by such vigorous thinking, by asking so many earnest questions that it happened. In 1949, my father was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. In the end, for Dr. Yukawa, more questions than ever left to be asked. More thinking than ever before that must be done. New York City. He prefers a quiet, smaller town, such as Princeton or Kyoto. But in big metropolis, he finds more stimulating. This western city, for Dr. Yukawa, is like a laboratory. Find the same freedom as in science. To question for this, to think what might be, and to go forward. For me, it's a difficult choice. How does one find a courage to be always alone? The strength of mind to think only about those things you don't want the patience to ask questions without end. So when you're my mother, I believe, is to provide answers, such as how to bring a stop to thoughts that never end. All my mother's answers seem to say the same thing. There is a fixed way to live that has grown up from the oldest times and strives always to be well-ordered and beautiful. Whenever I wish to remember the land where I was born most clearly, I record the dancing of my mother. Not it seems to me to ask questions, but to learn the answers that have long been provided. This is a way of my mother. I had a choice to make now, because now is the time that I graduate from my high school for all those who leave the general studies of their youth. There is a choice. Which profession to pursue. But for me, it appears there are many choices, all mixed up. The way you, my father or my mother, to try and become a theoretical scientist or a Buddhist philosopher, to choose a world not yet here or in the distant past, the land where I was born or this new one, to ask questions or to learn the old answers. It was my name they called Takahaki Yukawa. It was certainly not proper for me to take a diploma. It was clear that I was not ready in my own mind to graduate. I had to explain this to my professors. It was only proper, I must, but I had not the courage. It was good I did not disgrace this occasion and myself. What I needed was not courage, but something else. I found that out after the ceremony was finished. Takahaki, I'd like you to meet my parents, Mr. and Mrs. Bear, Takahaki Yukawa. I want you to meet my father. Who made one life with my mother? Not two. There was no conflict here, but a marriage, a union. Not a separation. Introducing them for the first time to a schoolmate. For the first time to someone new, I saw them for the first time with the eyes of a stranger. This was Takahaki and Mrs. Yukawa, whose life together was serene and happy. For me who saw between them only separate ways, this was a surprise. A growing surprise. Were there two ways indeed? Or was each a part of the other? There was not much time to consider the matter. In three more weeks you are returning to Japan. My father was to spend a year at Kyoto University. Already we were sending those things we could not take by plane. And certainly by the time we left I had to be sure about what I wished to do. But now could it be there was no clear choice? Profoundly silent as I stand in the garden of the cathedral. Only faintly do I hear the voice of the choir in the distance. In the oldest, most classic tradition, this was a poem by a nuclear physicist. My father and my mother, who delighted in the order of the past, they took a delight of the world in the newest, most modern house for equipment. Very this machine I see called. To use a machine, my father once explained, one should understand its nature. Whether it's a cake mixer, or the great cyclotron at Columbia University, where downtown is ahead of the physics department. It may be a kitchen utensil, or a mechanism so powerful a door six feet thick is needed for protection. But all machines are alike. A machine is built up out of mathematics, and so it can help us solve problems only of quantity, how much or how little, more or less. It cannot help us with the problems of value, of good or bad. While mathematics is surely the language of relationships, it has nothing to do with human relationships. When you leave the great magnet of the cyclotron and take back once again your watch, you come from a place where time is measured by the 10,000th part of a second to our own everyday kind of time. With the human problems of this, our own time, a machine cannot help us. To settle the difficulties that man has with himself, we must look to a different kind of wisdom to progress and expand. We need the oriental acceptance of tradition to know the responsibility we all share as human beings. If out of these two civilizations a new synthesis can be achieved, there is a chance for growth. If not... My father never finished, but I could sit now even in this job of parking. All prints and a pamphlet on the latest mathematical computer both went into the same case. Between the way my father and mother, there was no clear line of separation. The synthesis, Dr. Yukawa talked about, this was the end for what they lived. Both of them, my mother held to the past for the ladies of Gramercy Park she exhibited a tea ceremony of many centuries ago. It was proper, it was needed, that she do so. While my father looked into the future, for what would be the facts of a century to come? A tea ceremony and a mathematical seminar. They made one life. He gave me a gift to a marriage holding on to what was old at the same time seeking freedom to reach into what was new. It was difficult. But this is what my father and mother had done. This too was a history of the land where I was born. This is what I too in my own life must do. And to make a start, it was surely best that I did not return not yet to Japan by the side of my parents. I had to run the loneliness that comes with freedom. The old lessons of the country for my birth so far away. These I had started. There were new lessons to face in this strange world that leaped out into the future. To make a start, it was best that I remain here for the year to come by myself. And so I could not accept this gift for the stay if I was here. The time had come. This was also the proper occasion when I could tell him why I was here.