Re: Physics Discussion Thread
Posted: 23 Oct 2025 23:27
Sharing: a beautiful tribute. TsinghuaRen gathered at the Institute for Advanced Study to mourn the passing of Prof. Chen Ning Yang. They offered their respects, remembering his remarkable legacy and lifelong dedication to science and education. Prof. Chen Ning Yang will be forever remembered.
--On Yang's retirement from SUNY in 1999, Freeman Dyson called Yang "the pre-eminent stylist" of 20th-century physics alongside Albert Einstein and Paul Dirac, citing how Yang "turns his least important calculations into miniature works of art, and turns his deeper speculations into masterpieces.
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(As an American citizen he was very much respected in US, was pre-cursor to Nixon - China thaw (1970) (His father was ill then , and US allowed him to travel to China when there was virtually no contact between these two nations - which followed later with Nixon's travel to China).. he later became Chinese citizen but had very high respect in US)With non-Abelian gauge fields generating nontrivial Lie algebras, the possible forms of interaction between fields become unique, so that symmetry dictates interaction. This idea is Yang's greatest contribution to physics. It is a contribution of a bird flying high over the rain forest of little problems in which most of us spend our lives.