Chen Ning Yang, Chinese-American physicist and Nobel laureate, dies at 103 | China
Chen Ning Yang, one of the world’s most famous physicists and Nobel laureate, died after an illness at the age of 103 in Beijing on Saturday, state media outlet Xinhua reported.
Born in Hefei in eastern China’s Anhui province in 1922, Yang was a Chinese-American physicist who worked on statistical mechanics and symmetry principles in elementary particle physics.
Yang shared the 1957 Nobel Prize in physics with Tsung-Dao Lee, who died in 2024.
This award was given for his work overturning the widely accepted “parity laws” that the forces acting on fundamental subatomic particles are symmetrical between left and right. They overturned the concept of “mirror symmetry” as it is popularly defined.
Before Lee and Yang questioned this basic principle, it was believed that the mirror image of any process showed a series of events that could occur in the same way in the real world. In reality, there is no way to tell whether you are watching a real event or its mirror image.
According to biographical details on the Nobel prize website, Yang grew up in the atmosphere of the Tsinghua University campus outside Beijing, where his father was a professor of mathematics.
After completing his undergraduate and graduate studies at Chinese universities, he moved to the USA at the end of World War II on a scholarship at the University of Chicago.
There Italian Prof. He came under the influence of Enrico Fermi. naturalized American physicist known as the creator of the world’s first artificial instrument nuclear reactor.
Yang had been at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton since 1949 and became a professor in 1955.
via Reuters
