Terada Torahiko, a Physicist and a Haikai Poet

Terada Torahiko is known as a scientific essayist in Japan, but hardly anyone knows he was a haikai poet as well as a physicist. According to him, haikai poetry and physics are two different ways of conceiving Nature, both valid and perhaps complementary to each other. Seeing his research in physics looking for regularities in apparently irregular phenomena in everyday life, we may say his haiku haikai spirit is manifest there and that he was pioneering a new science such as the one developed later by Ilya Prigogine. His association of haiku haikai poetry and Freudian interpretations of dreams leads us to rethink the relation between science and literature. This paper examines Terada's poetics as well as his research in physics in order to see how one can associate the Two Cultures separated from each other for such a long time.