Toichiro Kinoshita makes a transatlantic phone call

 

to Kay, June & Ray Kinoshita, June 2023

 

I should have gone through my diaries and correspondence from 1963-1973 but many deaths and general decay of my generation seems to be getting me down, and I can see I will not get through this any time soon, so here is a tidbit I would have written about. You, being all amazing students, and me almost as good of a student, we have all had decades of recurrent nightmares that go something like this: You have suddenly received a letter from your high school, and they have found out that you had missed the exam in -let's say- biology -and your high school diploma (and the college diploma that followed) is null and void until you complete your biology requirement. This nightmare comes back and back again for years and decades, until the work takes over and you have no time for nightmares any longer.

So, you paid Velma to type it up and you have delivered your PhD thesis in July 1973, you have not as much as touched a computer keyboard for the next 4 years, so traumatic all the computer nonsense had been, once Tom lured you into this madness by giving you first a few easy Feynman integrals that you aced, there was no turning back. Way too much had been invested into the calculation. It was like 2 years in the trenches of Vietnam and that was not what you had gotten into grad school for.

You have totally changed what you work on, you have thrown away anything that might even vaguely smell of your PhD thesis, except for a tiny ring-book that contains the lists of the numerical values of some 1000 (?) Feynman integrals you had computed . It's 1995 (?) and your Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen office phone rings. It's Tom. It cannot be good - he had never called you, and a transatlantic call costs an arm and a leg. Tom wants to know whether I had computed the integral 63-B (let's say). I have no idea, I do not even have my PhD thesis (it's in my American brother's basement someplace in Michigan) but I have this little ring-binder on the bookshelf. I run for it, I find 63-B and wow! 

 

I tell Tom: "Sapirstein did 63-B."
Saved.

The thing is, Tom was not into making mistakes, and I caught all of mine by finding independent calculational methods to cross-check everything - in our 2 years of calculation we found only one, numerically small error in one of our counter-terms, due to a typing error in a Jacobian. We found it by recalculating everything in a new formulation, one which I believe I had invented (my memory is of the idea coming to me while babysitting for a graduate student friend's baby), and Tom believed he had invented (he must have had a different memory, you were too big and too wild for any babysitting).

 

I never found out what happened to Sapirstein.

I have this somewhere in the diaries and letters. But I did find a letter from Tom in the sole ring-binder leftover from my PhD calculations.

 

Toichiro Kinoshita: the theorist whose calculations of g-2 shed light on our understanding of nature - 29 May 2023 Robert P Crease 

Toichiro (“Tom”) Kinoshita (1925–2023): Pioneer of precision in tumultuous times - July 11, 2023 Robert P Crease

Masako Kinoshita - Me & Olivia go way back

Memorial for Toichiro & Masako Kinoshita

 

 AIP Oral History Interview

From AIP Oral History Interview - January 9, 10 & 18, 2016 Robert P Crease 

Crease:

Oh, right. ok. And now you do another sixth-order radiative correction paper.

Kinoshita:

Yeah.

Crease:

Paper 53.

Kinoshita:

And this was my graduate student.

Crease:

How do you pronounce it?

Kinoshita:

Cvitanović.

Crease:

Cvitanović, oh.

Kinoshita:

And this is the beginning of the serious g-2 work.

Crease:

Why do you describe this as serious as opposed to the other papers?

Kinoshita:

Because the other papers were approximations. These are all approximations. You cannot be serious. So is this. If you use the renormalization group technique, you only calculate the leading term, not the complete calculation. But this is the beginning of a complete sixth-order calculation. And he was a very good student.

Crease:

Where was he from?

Kinoshita:

From Yugoslavia, or whatever that…

Crease:

Where is he now?

Kinoshita:

He’s at Georgia Tech or someplace in mathematics. After writing this paper and a few more papers on physics, he decided not to work on physics. [pause] To work this, we wrote several papers with Cvitanović. These are all different parts of the same problem.

[... later...]

Kinoshita:

[...] But experiment is better than 10%. And so, you have to do eventually the exact calculation to all the sixth-order terms. That’s what I did. By that time, I said—I did a few more diagrams with Brodsky, but he had something else to do, so I took care of all the remainder. In particular, I had a very good student, and he was responsible for filling out how to do the sixth-order in a numerical way.

Crease:

Who was that student?

Kinoshita:

I just [laugh] need to remember. Cvitanović.

Crease:

Cvitanović, oh yes.

Kinoshita:

And then after—many years after, we solved numerically the sixth-order problem, not only the light-by-light, but all the terms, with the help of Cvitanović

[... later...]

Kinoshita:

You see, when we did the sixth-order with Cvitanović, algebra formulation was general enough you can apply to any order. So, the [inaudible] was already sort of set up. So, going from sixth-to eighth-order theoretically there was no roadblock to worry about except that it was a much bigger problem [laugh] and you needed much bigger computers. [...] I wouldn’t do any calculation unless some experiment has come out with a challenge, a new measurement and so on. At this time, when I finished the sixth-order, I thought that was the end of my calculation of g-2 because it was better than the experimental result coming out of Michigan.

[... later...]

Kinoshita:

Yeah. But anyway, this was at the international conference at Tbilisi in 1976.

Crease:

Tbilisi, yeah.

Kinoshita:

I was attending the conference, and then a guy named Lowell Brown at the University of Washington told me that I had to get busy again [laugh] because Dehmelt was doing a new experiment using a Penning trap which was three orders of magnitude more accurate than the [inaudible] precession experiment at Michigan. And Dehmelt, a few years later won the Nobel Prize for that work. So, that’s why I started the eighth-order. Or no, let’s see is that eighth-order or tenth-order? I’m not quite sure. Tenth-order essentially I start around year 2000, so later than that. So, must be eighth-order.

[... later...]

Ok, anyway, so Lindquist started on the eighth-order and because of Lowell Brown’s information that Dehmelt was now setting up a new experiment or he was getting new results which were three orders magnitude better. So, the eighth-order has to be done. That’s why [laugh] I did it. And as I said, the machinery for eighth-order was already available due to the work of Cvitanović in the sixth-order. So, that was not a big problem. The computer at Cornell was never as good as I wished, so I used some national computers at San Diego or someplace. But anyway, the requirement for the computer at that stage was not really big, and so we could get some preliminary results fairly quickly. But then when Dehmelt’s result came out, certainly I wanted to do the next order, the tenth-order, because the tenth-order can be as big as the contribution of the eighth-order.  [...]

Rashômon  (what I remember)

Perturbative QED - Flying to Brookhaven with box-fulls of cards - and why did I do this? - Gauge invariance is the bane of my life - Finite QED