Yang Zhenning was born in Hefei, Anhui Province on October 1, 1922 (later his date of birth was mistakenly written as September 22, 1922 on his overseas passport in 1975). He was less than one year old when his father Yang Wuzhi was admitted to study in the United States at public expense and went abroad. When he was 4 years old, his mother began to teach him how to read square characters, and she taught him 3,000 characters in more than a year. Yang Zhenning recalled when he was 50 years old: "The total number of characters I recognize now is estimated to be no more than twice that number." '

In 1928, when Yang Zhenning was 6 years old, his father came back from the United States. When they met, he asked him if he had gone to school. He said he had read it. What books have you studied? I have read "Longwen Whip Shadow". Ask him to memorize it, and he will memorize it all. Yang Zhenning recalled: 'My father then asked me what the book meant, and I couldn't explain it at all. However, I remember he gave me a pen as a prize, which was something I had never seen before. '

When Yang Zhenning was in elementary school, his math and Chinese scores were very good. Before graduating from middle school, he was admitted to Southwest Associated University. That was in 1938, when he was only 16 years old. In 1942, 20-year-old Yang Zhenning graduated from university and immediately entered the graduate school of Tsinghua University. Two years later, he obtained a master's degree with honors and was admitted to a publicly-funded study abroad program in the United States. In 1945, he went to the United States to study at the University of Chicago, and received his doctorate in 1948.

In 1949, Chen Ning Yang entered the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as a postdoctoral fellow and began to collaborate with Tsung-Dao Lee on particle physics research. During this period, he encountered many puzzling phenomena and unsolvable problems. They boldly doubted and carefully verified, and finally overturned the law of parity conservation, making the confusion disappear and the problem solved. Chen Ning Yang said this in his 1957 Nobel lecture: 'At that time, physicists found themselves in a situation like a person groping for a way out of a dark room. He knew that in a certain direction, there must be a door that could get him out of his predicament. But in which direction? 'It turns out that in that direction the law of conservation of parity does not apply to weak interactions. '

Zhenning Yang's contributions to physics are wide-ranging, including particle physics, statistical mechanics and condensed matter physics. In addition to discovering parity nonconservation with Tsung-Dao Lee, Chen-Ning Yang also took the lead in proposing the 'Yang-Mills Gauge Field' with R.L. Mills, and founded the 'Yang-Baxer Gauge Field' with R.Baxter. equation'. American physicist and Nobel Prize winner E. Segre praised Chen Ning Yang as "one of the three theoretical physicists in the world who can be regarded as all-rounder for decades."

Yang Zhenning remembers the legacy of his father Yang Wuzhi: 'You should remember the country's kindness while you are alive'. In the summer of 1971, he was the first American scientist to visit China. He said: 'As an American scientist of Chinese descent, I have the responsibility to help build a bridge of understanding and friendship between these two countries that are closely related to me. I also feel that I should contribute some strength to the development of science and technology in China. '

This is what Yang Zhenning said and what he did. In the past six years, he has traveled frequently between China and the United States and made many fruitful academic contacts. He wrote two poems like this: "The clouds, water, wind and thunder change rapidly, and things compete with each other and the sky competes with each other day and night." '

People praise Nobel Prize winner Yang Chenning, who has spent half a century at the forefront of theoretical physics, as a scientist with perseverance and mathematical genius. He works to reveal the symmetries of nature that are often hidden behind the messy results of experimental physics.

Chen Ning Yang has long worked at the seemingly mysterious crossroads of physics and mathematics. In this field, a beautiful set of equations can be a source of inspiration and provide insight into how the physical world works even before experimental evidence exists. This is a world that is difficult for outsiders to understand. There are blackboards full of equations with Greek letters, there is a "taste" and "style" that seeks to use mathematics to solve problems, and there is a heartfelt desire to use correct language to describe the physical world. inspiration.

Physicist Dyson said at an academic symposium held at Stony Brook last year for Chen Ning Yang's retirement: "Yang Zhen Ning's wonderful taste in mathematics shines on all his work. It makes his not so important. His work became a delicate work of art, and his profound speculation became a masterpiece. This enabled him to "see the mysterious structure of nature more deeply than others."

Chen Ning Yang already has long hair, but he looks much younger than his actual age. He still shuttles between New York and the Far East. He has close ties with universities in Hong Kong and Beijing, and is chairman of a center for theoretical physics in Seoul, South Korea.

In a wide-ranging conversation about his life and times, Chen Ning Yang talked about his career in physics and his regrets about not being able to pursue research in certain areas. Chen Ning Yang also talked about his childhood in China and his long-term efforts to bridge the scientific and cultural differences between the United States and his home country. Yang spoke of his concerns about a widening rift in U.S.-China relations and the difficulties it will create for Asian and Asian American scientists due to the recent investigation into suspected espionage by Taiwanese-born physicist Wen-ho Lee. ·In 1971, Sino-US relations began to thaw, and Yang Zhenning returned to mainland China for the first time since he came to the United States as a graduate student in 1945. He met with the late Zhou Enlai and other leaders of China and helped launch scientific cooperation between the two countries. He worries these collaborations are in jeopardy.

In those days, FBI and CIA agents used to come to him after he returned from overseas trips. When CIA officials first approached Yang, Yang asked his secretary to record their conversation to avoid misunderstandings. Chen Ning Yang continues to maintain close ties with China. He said: "The FBI and the CIA have not come to trouble me again recently."

Chen Ning Yang is most concerned about science rather than politics. He talked about some of his experiences: How could a young student from a backward city in a remote area of ??China be lucky enough to participate in one of the most important ideological revolutions in the 20th century? This revolution was an attempt to use a unified approach to understand the infinite diversity of nature, from the chaotic explosions of stars to the quivering of electrons circling atomic nuclei.

In 1956, Yang Zhenning became famous for the first time. That year he and Lee Tsung-dao published an article together, overturning one of the central messages of physics - conservation of parity? The behavior of elementary particles and their mirror images is exactly the same. For this work, the two won the Nobel Prize in 1957.

In the long run, the pioneering work of Chen Ning Yang and the late Mills in 1954 is more important. That year, both men worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory. They proposed a theoretical structure called non-Abelian gauge fields. It later proved to be the key to describing forces and elementary particles in a unified way. "When it was written in 1954, it was extremely controversial," says Machinu, a theoretical physicist at Brock Haven. "Some people thought it had nothing to do with the physical world." At the time, Young and Mills did not pursue development. However, it was later proven that this mathematics, extracted from the abstract world of differential geometry and fiber bundles, was precisely designed to describe particle exchanges such as magnetism, electricity, the strong nuclear force, and perhaps the intermediate forces in major interactions. Place. Dyson said: "I would say that the most important thing in Yang Zhenning's work is that norms have often proven to be much more important than his and Li Zhengdao's work on parity."

Chen Ning Yang and The relationship between Lee Tsung-dao became increasingly tense, and the two broke up in 1962. Yang declined to discuss what caused their relationship to become strained. "This is the most disappointing thing in my life. I would say it's a tragedy," he said. The two had not spoken for decades.

Chen Ning Yang is rooted in mathematics, but he pointed out that his life's work is not a metaphysical game divorced from the real world. When he first went to graduate school at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s, he planned to become an experimental physicist. But he soon realized that his hands-on skills were poor. Colleagues in the laboratory joked: "Wherever there is an explosion, there is Chen Ning Yang.

"

Saos, an experimental physicist who once served as director of Brockhaven National Laboratory, said: "Zhenning Yang is a person with a very mathematical mind. However, due to his early academic qualifications, he is not familiar with experimental details. Very interested. He likes to talk with experimentalists and has a great appreciation for beautiful experiments. ”

The biggest challenge for physicists is still to propose a unified theory that is applicable to both the very large kingdom dominated by gravity and the very small kingdom dominated by quantum. Physics Scientists have made progress in this regard in the 1970s. They proposed a theory called the Standard Model. However, the Standard Model does not take gravity into account.

At present, string theory may be able to overcome this shortcoming. This theory has been modified to require ten or eleven dimensions of space-time, instead of the four-dimensional space-time we are familiar with, that is, the dimension of time plus the three dimensions of solid geometry. It has been more than 20 years since the string theory was proposed. It is very popular among theoretical physicists. However, in his later years, Chen Ning Yang did not agree with this theory. He doubted whether string theory or its derivatives could put all objective reality into a simple package.

Zhenning Yang said: "String theory has not been experimentally proven. It's too amorphous, too vague. "The problem is partly that exploring the effects of strings requires extremely high-energy, stronger particle accelerators. How to write a theory that works and do calculations in ten dimensions is also a problem.

Yang Zhenning proposed that physics is going through a transition period, and the continuous search for faster and smaller computer chips will be more attractive to young people than basic research. He said: "It is clear that in the next 30 years. In 50 years, people will pay more attention to the application of physics. The reason is not that all the fundamental questions have been solved, but that it is becoming increasingly expensive to delve deeper into the fundamental structure of matter. "He also said that Congress's decision to suspend the construction of the Superconducting Super Collider in 2005 was a signal that the era of abundant funding for high-energy physics was over. The Superconducting Super Collider is to be built in Texas, USA. An elementary particle accelerator with a diameter of 54 miles

Yang Chenning predicted that the actual needs of the computer industry will promote the development of physics between micro and macro. He acknowledged that many analysts. It has long been predicted that the 21st century will be the century of biology, just like the 20th century that just passed was called the century of physics. What environment enabled Chen Ning Yang to play an important role in the dominant physics? Listen to himself. Said that luck and ambition were equally important in his success.

In his early years, Yang Zhenning benefited from a lucky family environment and colleagues and scholars in a society that was more medieval than modern. connections. These paved the way for his journey into the wider world of knowledge and culture, and he is paying it forward through continuous efforts to establish a first-class research center in Asia.

Chen Ning Yang grew up in China. Hefei was a walled city in the middle of the city. At that time, the city's streets had no pavements and the city gates were so narrow that when the first cars arrived in the 1930s, most of the residents were illiterate. He didn't see a banana for the first time until he was 6 years old.

Yang Zhenning's grandfather was a mathematics teacher in a local middle school. He passed a scholarship exam and was able to go abroad to study at the University of Chicago. After returning to China, he taught at Xiamen University. Later he went to Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Yang Zhenning himself followed his father on the academic path. He said: "I am very lucky. Millions of people my age either starved to death or faced warlords' melee. "He lived in an academic community in Peiping, immersed in a community that valued research and knowledge. His father soon discovered that his son had a mathematical genius, but did not teach him mathematics directly. Yang Zhenning said: "Father's The philosophy is 'don't rush'. "While chatting, he would occasionally ask his son math problems. But his father also realized that education needs to be balanced. When Yang Zhenning finished his first year of middle school, his father invited a colleague to teach him ancient Chinese literature. After two summers of intense study, The young Yang Zhenning could recite all the works of Mencius, a disciple of Confucius.

When Japan invaded in 1937, Yang Zhenning’s grandfather was forced to leave Peiping and teach at Southwest Associated University in Kunming. Chen Ning Yang’s father continues to have good luck. Decades later, the young Yang Zhenning also entered this university and was taught by some of the most outstanding scientists in China at the time. Some of them later went to the United States, including Chen Shengshen. Chern, now retired from the University of California, Berkeley, is considered by many to be the most important differential geometer alive.

While in Kunming, Yang Zhenning began to improve his English. He decided to read English novels without a dictionary. The first novel he chose was Stevenson's "Treasure Island." This novel contains slang related to the sea, making it difficult to pronounce. He spent a week reading this book, and then read Austin's "Pride and Prejudice". After familiarizing himself with these two books, Chen Ning Yang said: "It will be easy in the future."

Chen Ning Yang also has another reason for going to the Western world: he admires Franklin, the early American scientist and statesman. Franklin Yang's autobiography inspired Chen Ning Yang. After going to the United States, he named him Frank and gave his first child the English name Franklin.

In 1945, Yang Zhenning’s father received the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship and went to the United States. Princeton University accepted Yang Zhenning's father, but he wanted to be a student of the talented Italian physicist Fermi, so he went to the University of Chicago and wrote his doctoral thesis under the guidance of Taylor, who was later known as the father of the hydrogen bomb. After the paper is written, it only has 4 pages. Taylor convinced Yang Zhenning that no matter what, a doctoral thesis of only 4 pages was always too short and asked him to lengthen it. He did so and added it to 23 pages. After making outstanding achievements in physics, he turned to the Far East. Chen Ning Yang will donate his manuscripts and letters to the Chinese University of Hong Kong instead of to the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is a visiting professor at the Chinese University of China. Chen Ning Yang has not ruled out the possibility of moving back to China, because after returning, he and his wife Du Zhili, who has been married to him for 50 years, will receive better care. ?Recently, Zhili underwent three tumor surgeries at Stony Brook State University Hospital, with good results. Chen Ning Yang still feels very comfortable in Long Island, and it doesn't look like he has to move away from his three adult children. All three have degrees in science. Yang Zhenning said: "They are Americans. They have very little exposure to Chinese culture." The eldest son Guangnuo graduated from the Computer Science Department of the University of Michigan and is now a financial consultant in Westchester County, New York. The second son Guangyu is a doctor of chemistry who lives in New York City and works for J. P. Marg Finance Company analyzes the chemical industry. My daughter, Matsuri, is a doctor in Levingsdon County, Montana.

Chen Ning Yang became a U.S. citizen in 1964. "We had a great time in the United States. We had many friends here. We were very comfortable in both societies," he said.

End of colloquium for his retirement at Stony Brook At that time, Yang Zhenning talked about a "great and far-reaching discovery" he made when he was 60 years old: "Life is limited." He read a poem by Li Shangyin, a ninth-century Chinese poet: The sunset is infinitely beautiful, but it is almost dusk.

At the beginning of the 20th century, another writer, who was also a friend of Yang Zhenning’s father? Translator’s note: Zhu Ziqing, changed these two lines of poetry to: But the sunset is infinitely beautiful, so why be melancholy near dusk? After a lifetime After pondering the mysteries of nature, Chen Ning Yang believed that this transformation more accurately described his thoughts in his later years.