Satosi Watanabe
| Satosi Watanabe | |
|---|---|
| Born |
May 26, 1910 Tokyo |
| Died | October 15, 1993 (aged 83) Tokyo |
| Other names | 渡辺 慧 |
| Occupation | Theoretical physicist |
Satosi Watanabe (渡辺 慧 Watanabe Satosi, 26 May 1910 – 15 October 1993) was a theoretical physicist. He studied various topics, such as the time reversal of quantum mechanics, pattern recognition, cognitive science, and the concept of time. He was the first physicist to show clearly that quantum probability theory is time-asymmetric (irreversible; non-invariant under time reversal), and reject the conventional analysis of the time reversal of probability laws. He developed the Double Inferential Vector Formalism (DIVF), later known as the Two-state vector formalism (TSVF), which is sometime interpreted as contradicting his proof of time-asymmetry, but this is a misunderstanding. He also proposed the Ugly duckling theorem.
Satosi Watanabe was born on May 26, 1910, in Tokyo. He attended Gakushuuin Middle High School and Tokyo High School. In 1933, he graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in theoretical physics, where Torahiko Terada was his teacher.
The imperial government sent him to France to study. Louis de Broglie encouraged Watanabe to study thermodynamics and wave mechanics.
In 1937, he moved to Leipzig and started to study nuclear theory under Heisenberg. In the same year, Watanabe married Dorothea Dauer, a scholar of German literature.
In 1939, at the beginning of World War II, he left Germany and stayed with Niels Bohr for a time. In December, he returned to Japan with his family.
In Japan, he worked at the Physical and Chemical Research Institute (Rikagaku Kenkyujo) at Tokyo Imperial University as an assistant professor, and as a physics professor at Rikkyo University. In 1950, he left for the United States.
His argument that quantum mechanics is time-asymmetric (irreversible; non-invariant under the time reversal transformation) is repeated in a number of his papers (1955; 1965; 1966; 1972). It is informal but quite correct, as a more formal proof (Holster 2003) confirms. This result means that physicists have used the wrong transformation of probability laws to represent time reversal, and the popular claims that quantum mechanics is time reversal invariant are invalid. Watanabe's argument has not been accepted by physicists or philosophers however. The assumption that quantum mechanics is time symmetric on the basis of invalid conventional proofs is almost universal in the literature on time in physics to this day.
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