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Chen-Ning Yang, Nobel laureate, dies at 103
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxrzzk02plo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxrzzk02plo
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- zaikunzhang 1y agoRIP.
- nhatcher 1y agoOf Yang-Mills fame among many other things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Chen-Ning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Chen-Ning RIP
- dboreham 1y agoSad news. Perhaps the last connection to OG physics. I was fortunate to meet Dr Yang a few times. Surreal to hear him describe working for Fermi and Oppenheimer and his reaction on hearing about the Hiroshima detonation. Some of his work: http://home.ustc.edu.cn/~lxsphys/2021-3-18/The%20conceptual%20origins%20of%20Maxwell's%20equations%20and%20gauge%20theory.pdf http://home.ustc.edu.cn/~lxsphys/2021-3-18/The%20conceptual%... And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang%E2%80%93Mills_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang%E2%80%93Mills_theory
- hammock 1y ago>Surreal to hear him describe working for Fermi and Oppenheimer and his reaction on hearing about the Hiroshima detonation. What did he have to say?
- dboreham 1y agoIt was a long time ago but I remember Fermi decided that he (Yang) didn't do well at experimental physics, saying "where there's a Yang, there's a bang". My impression was that the atomic bomb wasn't a surprise, with the idea that when the ship arrived he'd enter a new world as a result. He was Oppenheimer's assistant at Princeton. I don't think I knew that at the time, so he must have told me but I don't recall any details. We also had a discussion about Maxwell but his later article on the subject is a much better source than my fading memory.
- frumiousirc 1y agoHe told my advisor in the mid 90's, "neutrinos do not have mass". Shortly thereafter, the Super-Kamiokande ship arrived.
- kwoff 1y ago(re OG physics) Sheldon Glashow is still around, I think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Glashow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Glashow
- d_silin 1y agoA life well lived.
- thrownawaysz 1y agoChina only have 8 Nobel winners compared to the 425 from the US is crazy.
- em500 1y agoMaybe not that crazy given that most of their academic work was only published in Chinese until about 2 to 3 decades ago.
- ch4s3 1y agoI’m sure murdering tons of academics in the cultural revolution had nothing to do with it.
- khuey 1y agoIf you're familiar with the history of China since the Nobel prize started in 1901 it's not surprising. Five of those eight did their work outside China too.
- logicchains 1y agoIt's also quite interesting to compare to the Soviet Union, which managed around 30 Nobel laureates in spite of also going through a communist revolution and some genocides like China did.
- yanhang 1y agochina is still not its peak yet. the tech boom only starts few years ago.
- dredmorbius 1y agoRussia / the USSR had a recent intellectual, scientific, and technological history in ways that China largely did not. One datapoint: Sir John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty from 1804--1845, was part of a British envoy to China in the 1790s. Attempts to impress the Emperor with British science and technology left far less an impression than was hoped, with the Emperor dismissing the demonstration. A brief account of this being in the biography Barrows Boys by Fergus Fleming (1998). China does have a long history of scientific and technological development, though by the 20th century this was all but forgotten / overlooked by the Chinese themselves, and it fell on an outsider, Joseph Needham (TK-chinese) to reacquaint them with this past, in Science and Civilisation in China, a 30-plus volume work begun in the 1950s and still in production.
- max_ 1y agoI came to know of this guy though Jim Simons. He once "leaked" the idea that Jim Simon's trading success came from his use of ideas called "gauge theory" and "fibre bundles". I forgot the exact timestamp, but you will have to watch the entire interview to find that segment — https://youtu.be/zVWlapujbfo https://youtu.be/zVWlapujbfo
- xqcgrek2 1y agoIt's a trivial statement since many equities are correlated on a multidimensional manifold of characteristics. Jim Simons was just early and now rentech is nothing special.
- Mistletoe 1y agoThis reads like “Newton or Einstein were just early”. That’s the whole thing, being the first person to do it.
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- specialp 1y agoRentec is still world renowned after pioneering the quant business 40+ years ago. I don't think the rested on their laurels with some easy thing that they just stumbled on early
- Tazerenix 1y ago
- pessimist 1y agoUnderrated even among physicists. Among the immediate post war generation his contributions are up there with Feynman and Schwinger. To quote Freeman Dyson: "Professor Yang is, after Einstein and Dirac, the preeminent stylist of the 20th century physics. From his early days as a student in China to his later years as the sage of Stony Brook, he has always been guided in his thinking by a love of exact analysis and formal mathematical beauty. This love led him to his most profound and original contribution to physics, the discovery with Robert Mills of non-Abelian gauge fields. With the passage of time, his discovery of non-Abelian gauge fields is gradually emerging as a greater and more important event than the spectacular discovery of parity non-conservation which earned him the Nobel Prize."
- gsf_emergency_4 1y agoIn order to explain his impact to people, someone could find a friendlier name for "gauge"? Some say that list of stylists would not be meaningful without von Neumann (although Dyson might say that frogs have no style*) https://youtu.be/OmaSAG4J6nw?t=24m19s https://youtu.be/OmaSAG4J6nw?t=24m19s Please see next slide for a minimal example of a "real(!) gauge field", even if you don't like philosophy of physics. *https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17457678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17457678
- MengerSponge 1y ago> friendlier name for "gauge"? Do you suppose small-gauge railroads are too niche an interest? Or is "gauging" interest not friendly? It's abstractions all the way down, but the term was coined in its still generally used definition of "scale". To explain the concept to the general public, keep it simple and poetic. If they want to unpack your metaphor, they're going to need a few years of university physics education!
- gsf_emergency_4 1y agoSorry: gauge-field. It's poetic and you can pardon the french but the combination is alien. Poetry is hard: a poetic way to say "co-ordinate transformation" or "tensors" could help students to calculate with them. I'd suggest "shear-squeezing-your-xray-lens" for everything but I fear the backlash from teachers because that would take a doctorate (or more) to unpack!
- wave_function 1y agoOne of the Feynman lectures in physics is about Yang, Lee, and Wu's discovery. I thought it was a great listen: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/flptapes.html https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/flptapes.html #52 Symmetry in physical laws
- hoshikihao 1y agoWhy didn't they mention them in the lecture notes?
- codelieb 1y agoI don't know what "notes" you are referring to, but if you mean the chapters of The Feynman Lectures on Physics, the recordings and photos of Feynman's 2-year Caltech course on Introductory Physics were the source material from which they were made. When these edited versions of Feynman's lectures were created there was no intention of publishing the lecture recordings or photos - indeed there was no intention of publishing them as a book! You can find all the recordings and lecture photos, as well as Feynman's lecture notes and other materials related to The Feynman Lectures on Physics at www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu.
- leoh 1y agoThis is dope, I had no idea there were recordings of Feynman like this
- codelieb 1y agoYang died very recently. He was 103 years old.
- symbolicAGI 1y agoI am a former physics student of C. N. Yang’s at Stony Brook University. Rest In Peace.
- ThomasBHickey 1y agoAs an undergraduate in physics in the late 60's, he was just a name on a door. Never saw him.
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- _qua 1y agoI'd love to one day learn enough math and physics to really understand gauge theory beyond just the many pop-sci videos I've watched about it.
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- krbaccord94f 1y agoA miscellaneous structure for film negatives. Documenting his life in series of a relative and a photographic series. > Ning attended the prestegious Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. Yang-Mills theory for electro-magnetic force is grounded in integratable systems, a gauge theory in statistics, etc for elementary particles.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gsf_emergency_4 1y agohttps://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09892 https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09892 https://old.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1eksqho/nobel_laureate_in_physics_tsungdao_lee_of_leeyang/ https://old.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1eksqho/nobel_laureat...
- occamschainsaw 1y agoThere’s a fascinating story about S Chandrasekhar (of Chandrasekhar limit fame) driving 100 miles to teach him every week. Teaching two students, the professor got a Nobel prize and the two students got a Nobel prize. “ One story in particular illustrates Chandrasekhar's devotion to his science and his students. In the 1940s, while he was based at the University's Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wis., he drove more than 100 miles round-trip each week to teach a class of just two registered students. Any concern about the cost-effectiveness of such a commitment was erased in 1957, when the entire class -- T.D. Lee and C.N. Yang -- won the Nobel Prize in physics.” Source: https://chronicle.uchicago.edu/951012/chandra.shtml https://chronicle.uchicago.edu/951012/chandra.shtml
- mark_l_watson 1y agoChandrasekhar was a good friend of my father and from my childhood I remember Chandrasekhar and his wife being super-nice people. Thanks for sharing the story about his two students.
- hufdr 1y agoIn addition to the Yang Mills theory, parity nonconservation, phase transition theory, and the Yang Baxter equation, these are also among Yang Zhenning’s important theoretical achievements. Moreover, he has made numerous academic contributions in areas such as the integral formulation of gauge fields and cold atom research.
- tahoeskibum 1y agoI was fortunate enough to take his Quantum Mechanics class when I was a student at SUNY, Stony Brook. He used to a drive a simple white Honda Accord that was 7+ years old.
- lyc11776611 1y ago[dead]