Peer review, an obligatory process for almost all scientists before publishing their papers, has been considered a gatekeeper for modern scholarly publication. Despite its importance, studies on peer review, especially those from a perspective of the history of science, do not have a long history. Concerning Japanese scientific journals, it is fair to say that the history of peer review is still scarcely known. This paper focuses on the process of the introduction of peer review in Progress of Theoretical Physics, a European-language journal of theoretical physics launched by Hideki Yukawa in 1946. The peer review system was formally established in March 1955, but the trial-and-error process had begun in the summer of 1953. While a fully-developed peer review system already existed in Europe and the United States at that time, the review system introduced into Progress of Theoretical Physics was not an emulation of Western journals. Rather, it emerged through the internal circumstances of the postwar Elementary Particle Theory Group.

For a comprehensive description of the history of nuclear energy development, it is necessary to investigate nuclear energy education programs in universities, which are human resource development institutions. This paper focuses on the Department of Nuclear Engineering established in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Tokyo and presents an analysis as to why and how the department was established. Moreover, an examination as to whether the goals of establishing the department were achieved in its early years is presented. The University of Tokyo is known to have developed one of the most extensive educational systems; however, it lagged behind other universities in terms of nuclear energy-related activities. The establishment of the department was led by the Ministry of Education in response to the demands for educational reform from the industry and for the development of nuclear energy policies. Various factors and internal circumstances of the university delayed its establishment. The proposed educational system changed from a research institute, through an integrated graduate education system, to a new department of engineering. Accordingly, the purpose of the organization also changed. The objective of establishing the department to train scientists and engineers in nuclear energy was achieved; however, it resulted in the fragmentation of the discipline.

Alchemy, which originated in Greek-speaking Egypt around the first century AD, was concerned at first with dyeing techniques in general, but later came to deal specifically with the production or imitation of gold and silver. In the medieval Arabic world, Ǧābir b. Ḥayyān developed alchemy further using the theory of balance where everything is reduced to numbers. Although the theory of balance can be regarded as an incipient form of quantification, little attention has been paid to it in the study of the history of science due to its connection with letter mysticism, i.e., the belief that the name denotes the essence. Ǧābir tried to grasp the ratio of the elements of things through decomposing their names into letters that were associated with certain qualities as basic elements of things. Given that numbers and words, or letters, are both discontinuous quantities according to Aristotle, the Ǧābirian theory of balance constitutes a system for understanding everything by means of discontinuous measurements. Furthermore, an examination of the Ǧābirian corpus including its unedited texts reveals that Ǧābir did not stop at relying on letter mysticism but pondered further on the concept of quantity by introducing metaphoric weight that indicates the internal balance of things. Thus, Ǧābir initiated quantification by expressing the weight of elemental qualities with numbers. Moreover, the notion of balance, derived from ancient Greek philosophy and medicine, was not confined to alchemy. Ǧābir applied this theory to various sciences that ultimately aimed at imitating the creation of things in the world.