Mt Fuji seen from Hakone

Autumn in Japan is going away, and winter is approaching. 「紅葉」, which means "coloured leaves", is coming down from high mountains to cities right now. So, visiting high mountains in the end of November is not such a good idea, but there are benefits about it.

The first reason is traffic jams... The best "coloured-leaf" season is limited to about two weeks or so. Everybody rushes into narrow mountain roads only in this period. The result is a long long queue along a mountain road. Only-one restaurant in a rural mountain region is full of sight-seeing people.
Whole atmosphere associated with the colour and beauty of the scenery is surely destroyed by these people.  If you visit in the end of November, colour of tree leaves might slightly remain in the mountains (still enjoyable), and best of all just a few visitors are in sightseeing spots. The atmosphere of the nature is back again.

Secondly, you can enjoy not only the colour but also the whiteness of snow-capped mountains at the same time, especially of Mt. Fuji in the case of Hakone. Today, I went to Hakone with an expectation for such a magnificent picture. Hakone is the region inside a large volcano mouth (called "caldera", or crater), near to Mt Fuji.

If you come from a wide Kanto plain where Tokyo is located, the Hakone region is something like a magical land hidden inside the large crater. Getting over the rim of the crater, you will see a different world... A blue lake in the bottom of the crater, and active volcanoes ejecting smokes from mouths are rising from the lake. In addition, the long rim of the crater surrounding these "magical land". Fantastic! Today, beyond the rim, I could see Mt Fuji with a snow cap, too!

Mt Fuji beyond the rim of the crater
surrounding the Hakone region.

Today's morning weather was not so good. From Tokyo, Mt Fuji was covered by thick grey clouds. Before getting over the rim to enter the Hakone region, Mt Fuji was also in clouds, and only the bottom part of the mountain was seen. But on arriving at Owaku-dani, a hot spring in Hakone, the clouds suddenly slided away to show the top of Mt Fuji!

Owaku-dani, a hot spring in Hakone
"Smokes" are water vapors from hot springs.

Hakone was drawn in Ukiyoe. Hiroshige's "Picture of Lake water in Hakone" is the most famous. Today's landscape reminds me of this Ukiyoe.

New formulae I found

I am writing a paper with a colleague of mine, about a new formula we have found recently. Creating a formula is a kind of "dream work" for any theoreticians. So, I am very happy that I have achieved that dream finally.

Interestingly, once you find a new formula, then the threshold for a next formula is lower than the first one. Actually, it happened to me.

I had been struggling for a certain physics problem for years, and in the beginning of the last year, I managed to find a numerical solution for that. I decided to make a presentation in a workshop in Japan, and gave a talk in the workshop in the mid September.

At the evening when I finished the presentation, I had a dinner with a collaborator to celebrate the success of our presentation. After I came back to my hotel, I opened my MacBook Air to check the e-mail box, together with a brief checking  of new preprints posted in the arXiv.org. I normally don't check frequently other people's work because I believed that my work was quite unique and that nobody could follow easily.

To my surprise, though, there were two new papers posted last two weeks, and they claimed that they have found a new formula. One was from Europe, and the other was from the US.

In fact, I did some pre-analysis for brushing up my numerical solution, and noticed that my result can lead to a possible new formula, of my own... When I noticed this possibility several months ago, I was so excited. I thought I was finally given a chance from the heaven that I could make a new formula. But due to busy everyday life, such as giving lectures, attending long-hour academic meetings, etc, I left the work unfinished. But I was not so irritated at this slow progress, because I thought I was the only one in the world to have noticed this possibility so far, and that everybody else was so far away from my level. My optimism is totally against the reality, in fact. Two groups in the world seemed to have noticed "my" finding almost simultaneously.

I was so shocked at these two preprints. It seemed my life as a researcher was completely finished by these two papers. But I noticed that these papers were interested in slightly different things. At least, the ansatz they employed were different from mine. I thought that if I summarize what I had in my mind, the final formula I would derive should be different from theirs. So since that night, I started to engage myself to derive a new formula in my own fashion. After a month, I submitted the manuscript to arXiv and a publisher of a physics journal.

During a waiting period for referees' comments, there was no news about the other two papers. It seemed that they were struggling to publish in a journal. Comments from the referees  returned to me very soon, and my paper was accepted for publication earlier than the others! My formula was admitted as a "new formula" that nobody else have found before. Soon after our publication, the formula found by the other two groups were also published in different journals. Luckily, we have submitted to different publishers, so that the reviewing was done independently.

My first formula was obtained more than 15 years since I took a Ph.D. But the second one came only six months after the first formula! And the third one was only a month later after the second!! The first two fomulae were already published. The paper I am writing at the moment is actually for the third one. I am sure that the latest one will be also published soon.

A textbook I wrote

I wrote a textbook for my lectures, actually this is the first book I have ever written! For two years, I have spent painful days to complete a book writing.

Before writing a sentence for this book, I was pretty confident that I could finish writing a book after six months or so. Theoretically it should be possible, but human brain is not designed to function in a multi-tasking fashion. I understand now that my brain is not an exception in this aspect. If your lecture course starts, your mind will be occupied by the thoughts of lecture preparations. If a physical society meeting nears, your mind will be occupied by the thoughts how to make a good presentation in the meeting. As a result, there is no room in your brain for writing a book during these busy days.

Of course, you can write something anyway in these busy days, but the contents you write might not be very interesting to readers, or even to yourself. There are sometimes cases that you feel bad about what you wrote, say,  a week ago. After a week, you can read back your writing from an objective point of view, and found that your writing is quite dull and non-interesting, although you have believed that your writing must be the best in the world while you were writing sentences.

To avoid such a bitter experience, "slow writing" may be helpful, that is, write, a short break, then read what you wrote, and modifications. If you repeat this sort of painstaking processes, then you may be more satisfied in the end. I would like to try this way of "slow writing" in the next occasion.