[HN Gopher] Chen-Ning Yang, Nobel laureate, dies at 103
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Chen-Ning Yang, Nobel laureate, dies at 103
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxrzzk02plo
Author : nhatcher
Score : 69 points
Date : 2025-10-18 05:47 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.chinadaily.com.cn)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.chinadaily.com.cn)
| zaikunzhang wrote:
| RIP.
| nhatcher wrote:
| Of Yang-Mills fame among many other things:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Chen-Ning
|
| RIP
| dboreham wrote:
| Sad 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%...
|
| And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang%E2%80%93Mills_theory
| d_silin wrote:
| A life well lived.
| thrownawaysz wrote:
| China only have 8 Nobel winners compared to the 425 from the US
| is crazy.
| em500 wrote:
| Maybe not that crazy given that most of their academic work was
| only published in Chinese until about 2 to 3 decades ago.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I'm sure murdering tons of academics in the cultural
| revolution had nothing to do with it.
| khuey wrote:
| If 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.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| Yang got out before Mao. China managed to birth and educate
| several world-class mathematicians and scientists in the short
| span between the beginning of Westernized education and Mao's
| take over... and then it stopped for several decades. The lucky
| ones managed to get out.
|
| Strange to think that revolutions, unrest, the Sino-Japanese
| war, and the civil war all provided better conditions for
| fostering top talent than Mao's China did.
| manquer wrote:
| India has similar number of laureates and nowhere had the
| similar kind of social upheaval or authoritarian regime like
| China or the soviet union had.
|
| I think it is bit more nuanced than just Mao, pre 1935 you
| could do ground breaking research in almost any field with
| limited to no funding at all. Since the war you need
| increasingly large amount of budgets which western
| universities with full government support enjoy, ans it was
| not possible to compete for India or China or even the Soviet
| Union to keep up.
|
| --
|
| The cultural changes you allude to, certainly were a medium
| term negative factor, but the pre 1950 setup were hardly
| sustainable or efficient. In pre Mao China or similarly
| British India (or even till recently) it was not a
| meritocracy there was a privileged elite who had all the
| opportunity and few shined if they were also talented.
|
| Today China is one of the most meritocratic economies after
| all - despite all the authoritarian flaws, we are only seeing
| positive growth in foundational scientific research and
| rapidly in contrast with the rising anti-science sentiment we
| are seeing in so many parts of the western and western
| influenced world.
|
| The socio-cultural reset was important and necessary for both
| China and India to progress, the methods of the Mao era are
| questionable both for their cruelty and also for how
| efficient and effective they were it was just bad all around
| however the need of the reset came from a valid place I
| think.
|
| ---
|
| There is whole dimension of bias which does disadvantage
| particularly Chinese research output today. Don't get me
| wrong I am not saying there is conscious bias against Chinese
| researchers. The bias is because despite the esteem the Nobel
| prize is not a global one.
|
| The committee sit in Scandinavian countries closely working
| with Norway government. The members are predominately
| affiliated to western universities and fluent in English or
| other European languages and read Nature / Science type of
| western journals.
|
| This always put Soviet researches before and now Chinese and
| Indian(to a lesser degree) at a disadvantage compared to
| their western peers.
|
| The committee are not equipped to judge the research output
| of the whole world, till recently this was not a problem,
| because western research post WW-II was the majority of the
| world output, but that is increasingly not true and in a
| multi-polar world.
| mmooss wrote:
| > the methods of the Mao era are questionable both for
| their cruelty and also for how efficient and effective they
| were
|
| Also for killing tens of millions of people, which not only
| is murder of each person but also those millions of people
| - and then their families - never benefit.
| logicchains wrote:
| It'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.
| kragen wrote:
| 9 if you count people from the Republic of China (https://en.wi
| kipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_cou...).
|
| But, since the Nobel was established, China has been invaded by
| Germany, Japan, Russia, Britain (largely India), France, the
| United States, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Japan again, and had
| a civil war which hasn't technically ended (plus the end of the
| Boxer Rebellion), a revolution, and the worst famine in human
| history. But probably the worst event for its Nobel chances was
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution. The civil
| wars also brought to power brutal dictatorships, including in
| the so-called Republic of China.
|
| The US has been invaded zero times and had zero civil wars
| during that period, and in the US, the Cultural Revolution and
| dictatorship are just starting. Consequently many people who
| might have been Chinese, German, Japanese, Russian, etc.,
| during the period in question were instead born in the US. And
| note that, on the page I linked above, 6 Nobel laureates from
| the US were actually born in China: Charles K. Kao, Daniel C.
| Tsui, Edmond H. Fischer, Yang, Tsung-Dao Lee, and Walter H.
| Brattain (!).
| hker wrote:
| > 9 if you count people...
|
| 13 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese
| _Nobel_laureate..., including peace prize laureates Liu
| Xiaobo (2010) and the 14th Dalai Lama (1989).
|
| > But, since the Nobel was established, China has been
| invaded...
|
| > The US has been invaded zero times...
|
| The number of external invasions is not a strong indicator of
| the number of Nobel Prizes, if you compare all countries,
| beyond just China or the US.
|
| And as you mentioned, the Cultural Revolution greatly reduces
| the chance of Chinese Nobel, so internal events can take a
| large role. And Mao led to more deaths--not to mention
| destruction to science and culture--than external invasions
| in the last century combined.
|
| > The civil wars also brought to power brutal
| dictatorships...
|
| The dictatorship arguably hasn't ended, by taking another
| less brutal form. And to be precise, CCP brought the civil
| wars and its consequences, not the civil wars brought
| dictatorships.
| max_ wrote:
| I 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
| xqcgrek2 wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| This reads like "Newton or Einstein were just early". That's
| the whole thing, being the first person to do it.
| pessimist wrote:
| Underrated 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."
| wave_function wrote:
| One 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
|
| #52 Symmetry in physical laws
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