Creativity and Intuition: A Physicist Looks at East and West by Hideki Yukawa (review)

I72 Books the generative forces of Nature, a concept which he emphasized by surrounding her with a burst of vegetation, which at times took the shape of a surge of water.’ Pedretti’s observation here seems plausible. But he could have gone farther by suggesting that the spirals of the cyclonic drawings and the generative spirals surrounding Leda might well derive from that initial outburst each of us perforce experiences at birth. Indeed Rank, one of Freud’s earliest dissidents, made this ‘birth trauma’ the center of his philosophy of psychoanalytic procedure. Pedretti, unlike Rank, seems to be still in thrall of the Freudian explanation for Leonardo’s life. Briefly, this had him ‘neurotic, obsessed, a homosexual and ineffective both as an artist and scientist’! Thus Pedretti, overlooking Leonardo’s interest in the lovely nude form of Leda and his many portraits of beautiful and fascinating women, overlooks the obvious fact that this is not the mind-set of the typical homosexual, who hates and rejects women. So, at the end of his story, in order to adhere strictly to the Freudian line, he deals with the St. John (Bacchus) at the Louvre Museum and the St. Mary Magdalene (now labelled falsely a St. John) in this fashion. The first, he says, is not the work of Leonardo; he neglects to tell us which of the students might have painted it. As for the woman, he is puzzled by the fact th t she has long curling hair (which would ally her to thekeda). What he forgets is that most of the Magdalenes copied by Leonardo’s followers have such hair and, indeed, it was an iconological attribute of this temptress turned saint. Perhaps the most appealing attribute of the book is its 177 illustrations in black and white and 22 in color. The addition of the color is most significant. For example, the juxtaposition of the color plates of the Louvre and London versions of the Madonna of the Rocks makes clear that Leonardo’s color schemes were continually changing according to the needs of his spiritual development. One color plate, showing a painting with which this reviewer has been well acquainted for the last 50years, is the Ginevra d’ Benci now at the Washington National Gallery. The original has a bluish greenish tone but the reproduction lends to the lady a much happier orange tone. Creativity and Intuition: A Physicist Looks at East and West. Hideki Yukawa. John Bester, trans. Kodansha International, New York, 1973. 206 pp., $8.95. Reviewed by Harold K. Hughes* This is a collection of 21 essays written over a period of many years by the man who won the 1949 Nobel Prize in physics for his theory of nuclear forces. The topics range over some of the fundamental problems of philosophy as well as of physics but one feels that beneath his study of Laotse, Chuangtse, Motse and Epicurus lies a drive to penetrate the conceptual barriers that have confronted contemporary physicists for over a generation. Although there is too much physics to sustain the interest of many readers of Leonnrdo, artists will appreciate how Yukawa chose the subject of his life’s work, systematically matching his introversion against the requirements of various professions and, having chosen physics, further restricting the field to one that was little known and poorly populated with researchers. Like artists, Yukawa declares his independent spirit in problem solving: ‘I can never work on a problem that I’ve been told to solve by somebody else. My subconscious always rebels against being ordered to do something. Personally, I look on myself as a docile kind of man, but my subconscious seems to be a rather nastier character.’ AS if in support, he quotes Laotse at least four times: ‘The wise ruler is without compassion; he sees the common people as straw dogs (discarded when no longer needed).’ *State University of New York, Potsdam, NY 13676, U.S.A. By the time Yukawa was 61 years old he was able to write: ‘Unlike my youth, I ’ m interested in all kinds of things, and from now on I may gradually become unable to tell what my main profession is.’ Still...