ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Doing physics otherwise: The rise and fall of “Terada Physics”

• In Event: How Sciences End 2

English Abstract

Torahiko Terada (1878–1935) was a Japanese experimental physicist known for his distinctive research style, later called “Terada Physics.” Alongside his pioneering work on X-ray diffraction, Terada and his students investigated a wide range of natural and everyday phenomena—crack patterns, snow crystals, and fireworks—that came to be called “the physics of form.” By reexamining the trajectory of Terada and his physics, this paper explores how scientific traditions end, persist, or are renegotiated under changing disciplinary and cultural conditions. Terada remained committed to classical physics—the traditional mode of “doing physics”—and directed his research toward culturally resonant objects as well as everyday phenomena. Grounded in aesthetic sensibility and critical of “gleaning the leftovers of Western science,” his work implied an alternative, locally rooted mode of inquiry. As physics shifted toward atomic and quantum domains, the flexible framework of classical physics that had allowed his work to be recognized as legitimate within the discipline of physics was itself marginalized, and with it, Terada Physics. Yet elements of his practice endured in emerging fields such as applied physics and the physics of matter. At the same time, his legacy was appropriated in wartime discourse as a model of “Japanese science,” and continues to be revisited today, revealing the complex entanglement of scientific practice, cultural identity, and the afterlives of disciplinary traditions.

Author

• Hiroto Kono, National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo