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."
The Yang in Yang-Mills is the same Yang as Lee-Yang! Somehow I had those filed as a different generation, where Lee-Yang is "old", and Yang-Mills is "young". I'm an idiot
The path from Lee-Yang to Yang-Mills is short (~months) but the shortness is instructive
(It's more than just a lesson in style, imho. Lee-Yang could become more famous than Yang-Mills, in time! Like you're implying there-- that was a honest mistake on your part; your claim to "idiocy" teaches less than it might seem :).
It's also an artifact of my subfield (nEDM): A common "history of nEDM" goes Lee-Yang then skip forward to Cronin and Fitch, then sketch a picture of how nEDM violates T (and P, but that's not groundbreaking), then talk about how the French used a decommissioned naval gun turret for one of their experiments. Bless 'em.
Have you ever seen The Timetables of History? It re-syncs world events that you learned about from disparate sources. I kind of need that here!
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!
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!
The problem you run into is that laypeople operate with modified Aristotelian physics. They might "know" that the speed of light is a speed limit, and they might "know" that quantum mechanics says you can't measure anything.
They also believe that objects keep moving after you push them because they retain a memory of your push, and when that force runs out the objects come to rest*
You are not, will not, cannot teach them how to do a meaningful modern calculation in a single conversation**. Hell, Feynman's lectures were a failure: they didn't serve the audience he was supposed to be teaching (first year students).
So are you talking to students? Or is this a cocktail conversation? Because those are two very different settings.
*&**) These points are extensively documented in the PER literature. SciComm is really important and really useful, but it's not the same as effective pedagogy.
It's named that for a reason. It has to do with invariance under an arbitrary selection of parameters like scale, hence, choice of railroad gauge.
At least they tried to give a descriptive name! Most ideas are named after the people who are most closely associated with them. Yang-Mills. Newtonian. Euclidean. Planck. Many of those names invoke very specific ideas, even though eponyms are about as opaque as they come.
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.
It 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.
There’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.”
Chandrasekhar 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.
I don't think it's a crackpot theory. The basic idea is that the gauge group is the group of rescalings of the units of money, and arbitrage appears as curvature in the gauge field, i.e. you end up with a net change when you parallel-transport money around a loop in the (discrete) space of assets and time.
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.
Rentec 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
I 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.
I 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.
In 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.
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 (!).
> 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.
I don't think even the Cultural Revolution or anything else Mao did had much of an effect on Nobel prize-worthy research, simply because there wasn't much to disrupt to begin with. In terms of education, the biggest change was in secondary school enrollment, which more than doubled during the Cultural Revolution before dropping back down, which I assume represents people staying students for longer instead of graduating, rather than an expansion of access. University education remained a rarity for long after that, only surpassing 10% enrollment in 2002: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/primary-secondary-enrollm...
I guess we'll see Chinese scientists winning Nobels at a rate commensurate with other big countries in 20–40 years or so.
> I don't think even the Cultural Revolution or anything else Mao did had much of an effect on Nobel prize-worthy research, simply because there wasn't much to disrupt to begin with.
Count points:
- Intellectuals, academics, and teachers were persecuted, attacked, and killed by the youth (the Red Guards), in all schools and institutions in China.
- Search for “scholars killed during the cultural revolution”, or “list of scholars abnormally died in China during the cultural revolution” (or for a short list in Chinese https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/中华人民共和国被迫害人士列表#科学技术人士). This includes the leader of Two Bombs, One Satellite (nuclear weapon, ICBM, artificial satellite) 赵九章. Besides, those returned from overseas were considered traitors or spies, and just within the Chinese Academy of Sciences (top science institution), there are 229 scholars died due to the Cultural Revolution [1]. This destroyed the environment needed to do great science. Imagine if Yang went back to China in the early 1950s.
> I guess we'll see Chinese scientists winning Nobels at a rate commensurate with other big countries in 20–40 years or so.
Such predictions—Chinese scientists will win more science Nobels—has been made long ago. In 1998, “The Chinese-American Nobel Laureate Chen Ning Yang has also predicted that mainland scientists will win a prize within twenty years – even more than one, if the country’s economic development continues at its current rate.“ [2]
But reality shows otherwise, not until scientists and academics are respected in China. During COVID, politics overruled science, resulting in the Zero-COVID policy, which were brought down by widespread protests, not by science (counter evidence to the ineffectiveness of the Zero-COVID policy).
Unless you are implying that you predict a regime change by that time...
Of course the number of scholars killed is large in absolute terms and relative to the size of the Chinese research ecosystem at the time, but it's also small relative to the number of researchers worldwide at the time and to the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of Chinese scientists researching all kinds of things now, which is the result of explosive growth primarily over the past few decades.
Chen-Ning Yang was technically not wrong with his 1998 prediction, since Tu Youyou got 1/3 of the 2015 Nobel in medicine, but it didn't really make sense for him to link this to continued development, since the delay between discovery and award means that most of the prizes from 1998–2018 were for work that was already done before he made his prediction.
Over the same time frame, tertiary school enrollment went from 6.3% to 53.4%, and my 20–40-year prediction is based on a guess of how long it will take for the work of all those freshly-minted scientists to enter the range of consideration for a Nobel.
> Chen-Ning Yang was technically not wrong with his 1998 prediction, since Tu Youyou got 1/3 of the 2015 Nobel in medicine, but it didn't really make sense for him to link this to continued development, since the delay between discovery and award means that most of the prizes from 1998–2018 were for work that was already done before he made his prediction.
Agreed. Though to nitpick, the part on “even more than one, if the country’s economic development continues at its current rate” is technically wrong, if we just count Chinese Nobel scientists developed in Mainland China (only Tu Youyou).
Chen-Ning Yang was bullish on Chinese science, but reality did not deliver.
Shing-Tung Yau is as bullish on Chinese mathematics in the future, but even he admitted that China is still decades behind in mathematical research, due to systematic issue which ‘“places too much emphasis on material rewards” and tends to encourage young researchers to work for titles instead of scientific advancements’. [1]
[1]: https://archive.is/MRDlP "China has problems to solve before its mathematics research can rise above WWII levels, scholar says"
The parent poster is talking about the Younghusband expedition into Tibet of 1903[1], I don't think it is the boxer rebellion in which British Indian troops had no direct involvement(AFAIK) and also those events happened before 1901 establishment of the Nobel Prize, which is the time period OP cites as the starting time range.
To see the Tibetan military expedition as an invasion of China, means to accept the Qing dynasty and its successor states (ROC,PRC)claim of sovereignty and not suzerainty over Tibet. A claim at the time which was not recognized by other countries specifically Russia, Britain and also Tibet.
The refusal of Tibetan government to accept terms of treaties they were not party to directly (i.e. the ones Qing China signed) was the official reason stated for the invasion by the British.
Either way it is a deeply contentious topic never legally settled in the 1907 agreement and had implications both to that era and modern geopolitics. No one then or now is purely looking at merits of the arguments.
The points will end up into esoteric discussion on whether is kowtowing and kneeling are the same thing, or is acknowledging supremacy is same as sovereignty, or the differences between vassal state or autonomous region or protectorate or suzerain.
Also the views of the countries/entities (or their successors) have also changed including the Tibetan government-in-exile in the last 120 years.
My knowledge of history is at best a passing student at high school level, this kind of discussion requires deep understanding of relationship of states, and of Chinese culture and language during Qing dynasty i.e. professional expertise which I certainly don't have.
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[1] My initial read was they meant either Arunachal Pradesh( South Tibet to the Chinese), Aksai Chin or the MacMohan line etc, but they clarified it wasn't the case.
The Boxer Protocol wasn't signed until September 01901 and involved permanently establishing a dozen foreign military bases inside China, so didn't, from my point of view, end the invasion. But it's true that the actual fighting was almost completely the previous year.
The research competition is basically a funding competition nowadays. In the 20th century, China had far less research funding for universities compared to U.S.. That's due to two facts:
1. China was poor back then.
2. China had barely no high-tech industries which can provide additional financial support to labs and cultivate talents.
Therefore, people got high-level education who want to pursue a research career would have less chance to get a job in China (at least mainland) and had to go to U.S., EU or Japan to utilize their knowledge.
In fact, until now, U.S. still offers the highest the research funding to its universities. That's why there're so many Chinese students in U.S. schools.
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.
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.
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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.
> 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.
Absolutely, I am in no way saying Mao era methods were justified, warranted or even effective.
They were misguided, ineffective, and directly or indirectly killed people in the millions.
I am just pointing out that, the atrocities of the era doesn't justify seeing pre 1960s or pre1950s years of China with rose tinted glasses as a better era, it wasn't unless you were in the elite.
It would be no different than seeing the 1970s or any earlier generation in U.S. history as a better era. Only a very small in-group perhaps had it good. Everyone else be it black, women, indigenous, various immigrants, religious, neuro or sexually diverse have only seen net improvements in last 300 years.
They were awful and achieved almost nothing but ruin, so by definition they were unnecessary.
But are you saying reform and change were unnecessary? The people of China were suffering immensely; the country had been in a state of domestic violent conflict, on and off, since before 1911 (as of 1949). The Communist Party became more corrupt.
Mao's policies and politics made all that much worse, but that doesn't mean nothing needed to be done.
China was already developing economically and technologically -- especially in coastal areas and in Manchuria (there was a large migration of Chinese to the area after it came under Japanese control).
That development would have continued.
I understand the anger and the desperation that made the Communist takeover possible but doing nothing at all and keeping all the elites in charge (instead of replacing them with new ones) would have been better.
> China was already developing economically and technologically
That's an odd version of history. China just went through WWII, including the awful Japanese invasion, which interrupted a massive civil war that restarted afterward, and which followed decades without a real national government.
> there was a large migration of Chinese to the area after it came under Japanese control
Japanese control didn't work out well for Chinese people, to say the least.
> keeping all the elites in charge
The elites had led China to disaster for a century, 'the century of humiliation' it's called (though blaming outside forces, which do deserve some blame).
> replacing them with new ones
Here we agree.
> would have been better
Certainly there is no source that can more than guess at that.
The better option would have been true democratic reform. It has worked superbly well in parts of China - Taiwan and Hong Kong. It was starting to work in 1989, and leaning in that direction before Xi.
Another point about Soviet scientists: it was very often a career-ending move to accept a Nobel prize unless you were a truly untouchable cult of personality and/or direct friend of those in power. See Andrey Sakharov, who first invented the soviet hydrogen bomb and later dedicated himself to non-proliferation which earned him a Nobel Peace prize. He was however barred from traveling to Oslo to accept in 1975, having already been blacklisted from classified work since 1968.
I wonder to what extent that lead to the curbing of consideration of those behind the iron curtain.
Peace prizes are different from science prizes. The Soviet Union had no problems with its scientists getting science prizes. It did sometimes had problems with letting them leave the country to actually receive them, of course.
While your disambiguation is valid, they very much wanted to minimize the potential fallout from individuals staying in, say, a Norwegian hotel and sampling the local culture only to return and speak fondly of said trip "beyond the curtain". Usually this was outweighed by the national prestige (and subsequent propaganda opportunity) from having a Soviet Nobel recepient but the KGB had an extremely heavy hand in deciding who got to go, regardless of scientific breakthrough.
~2/3 of US Nobel Laureates have not been born in the US. This tells you that things are a bit complex to analyze. You can also take into account second generation ones.
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.
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.
Russia / 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.
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."
The Yang in Yang-Mills is the same Yang as Lee-Yang! Somehow I had those filed as a different generation, where Lee-Yang is "old", and Yang-Mills is "young". I'm an idiot
The path from Lee-Yang to Yang-Mills is short (~months) but the shortness is instructive
(It's more than just a lesson in style, imho. Lee-Yang could become more famous than Yang-Mills, in time! Like you're implying there-- that was a honest mistake on your part; your claim to "idiocy" teaches less than it might seem :).
See this comment which might seem completely throwaway https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45632370)
In the same vein, here is a short-note of Yang, readable to nonscientists, here:
https://doi.org/10.1142/S0217751X03017142
(He rebuts Dyson)
Necessary Subtlety and Unnecessary Subtlety
It's also an artifact of my subfield (nEDM): A common "history of nEDM" goes Lee-Yang then skip forward to Cronin and Fitch, then sketch a picture of how nEDM violates T (and P, but that's not groundbreaking), then talk about how the French used a decommissioned naval gun turret for one of their experiments. Bless 'em.
Have you ever seen The Timetables of History? It re-syncs world events that you learned about from disparate sources. I kind of need that here!
In 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
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
> 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!
Sorry: 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!
The problem you run into is that laypeople operate with modified Aristotelian physics. They might "know" that the speed of light is a speed limit, and they might "know" that quantum mechanics says you can't measure anything.
They also believe that objects keep moving after you push them because they retain a memory of your push, and when that force runs out the objects come to rest*
You are not, will not, cannot teach them how to do a meaningful modern calculation in a single conversation**. Hell, Feynman's lectures were a failure: they didn't serve the audience he was supposed to be teaching (first year students).
So are you talking to students? Or is this a cocktail conversation? Because those are two very different settings.
*&**) These points are extensively documented in the PER literature. SciComm is really important and really useful, but it's not the same as effective pedagogy.
The word gauge is completely opaque to me, invokes no reasonable connotation.
I always wished they gave this thing a better name but I have no idea what.
It's named that for a reason. It has to do with invariance under an arbitrary selection of parameters like scale, hence, choice of railroad gauge.
At least they tried to give a descriptive name! Most ideas are named after the people who are most closely associated with them. Yang-Mills. Newtonian. Euclidean. Planck. Many of those names invoke very specific ideas, even though eponyms are about as opaque as they come.
> It has to do with invariance under an arbitrary selection of parameters like scale, hence, choice of railroad gauge.
Could you elaborate on that?
How do you know he's underrated?
I think it's so obviously a personal opinion it didn't need explicit mentioning.
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
(re OG physics) Sheldon Glashow is still around, I think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Glashow
>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?
It 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.
He told my advisor in the mid 90's, "neutrinos do not have mass". Shortly thereafter, the Super-Kamiokande ship arrived.
There’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
Chandrasekhar 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.
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
There is a theory connecting gauge theory and finance:
https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9710148
https://www.amazon.com/Physics-Finance-Modelling-Non-Equilib...
I don't think it's a crackpot theory. The basic idea is that the gauge group is the group of rescalings of the units of money, and arbitrage appears as curvature in the gauge field, i.e. you end up with a net change when you parallel-transport money around a loop in the (discrete) space of assets and time.
Simons himself completely disspells this idea in his interview on Numberphile.
AFAIK, one of the early hires at RenTech was Leonard Baum, famous for the Baum–Welch Algorithm.
RenTech is quite secretive, but this supports the rumors that simple graphical models for time series were behind some of their trading strategies.
Two other data points for this are
Brown and Mercer (who became ideologically opposed co-CEOs)
https://old.reddit.com/r/algotrading/comments/k299vp/were_br...
"Speech recognition" in those days meant Markov too
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.
This reads like “Newton or Einstein were just early”. That’s the whole thing, being the first person to do it.
Whether something is implemented on Jan 1 or Jan 15 is irrelevant to the grand scheme of things
If you only live your lifetime from Jan 1 to Jan 15, it matters a great deal.
Rentec 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
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
Yang died very recently. He was 103 years old.
Why didn't they mention them in the lecture notes?
I 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.
This is dope, I had no idea there were recordings of Feynman like this
Of Yang-Mills fame among many other things:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Chen-Ning
RIP
I am a former physics student of C. N. Yang’s at Stony Brook University.
Rest In Peace.
As an undergraduate in physics in the late 60's, he was just a name on a door. Never saw him.
I 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.
In 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.
I'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.
A 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.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09892
https://old.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1eksqho/nobel_laureat...
RIP.
A life well lived.
China only have 8 Nobel winners compared to the 425 from the US is crazy.
9 if you count people from the Republic of China (https://en.wikipedia.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 (!).
> 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.
Mao killed less than Taiping Rebellion, which had 100M per some study. Mao is probably half of that ,still more than world war 1 and 2 combined.
Yes, but that was 50 years before the Nobel Prizes were established.
I don't think even the Cultural Revolution or anything else Mao did had much of an effect on Nobel prize-worthy research, simply because there wasn't much to disrupt to begin with. In terms of education, the biggest change was in secondary school enrollment, which more than doubled during the Cultural Revolution before dropping back down, which I assume represents people staying students for longer instead of graduating, rather than an expansion of access. University education remained a rarity for long after that, only surpassing 10% enrollment in 2002: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/primary-secondary-enrollm...
I guess we'll see Chinese scientists winning Nobels at a rate commensurate with other big countries in 20–40 years or so.
> I don't think even the Cultural Revolution or anything else Mao did had much of an effect on Nobel prize-worthy research, simply because there wasn't much to disrupt to begin with.
Count points:
- Intellectuals, academics, and teachers were persecuted, attacked, and killed by the youth (the Red Guards), in all schools and institutions in China.
- Search for “scholars killed during the cultural revolution”, or “list of scholars abnormally died in China during the cultural revolution” (or for a short list in Chinese https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/中华人民共和国被迫害人士列表#科学技术人士). This includes the leader of Two Bombs, One Satellite (nuclear weapon, ICBM, artificial satellite) 赵九章. Besides, those returned from overseas were considered traitors or spies, and just within the Chinese Academy of Sciences (top science institution), there are 229 scholars died due to the Cultural Revolution [1]. This destroyed the environment needed to do great science. Imagine if Yang went back to China in the early 1950s.
[1]: https://blog.wenxuecity.com/myblog/74771/201904/2157.html "文革时中科院131位科学家被打倒 229人遭迫害致死"
> I guess we'll see Chinese scientists winning Nobels at a rate commensurate with other big countries in 20–40 years or so.
Such predictions—Chinese scientists will win more science Nobels—has been made long ago. In 1998, “The Chinese-American Nobel Laureate Chen Ning Yang has also predicted that mainland scientists will win a prize within twenty years – even more than one, if the country’s economic development continues at its current rate.“ [2]
[2]: https://china-us.uoregon.edu/pdf/Minerva-2004.pdf "CHINESE SCIENCE AND THE ‘NOBEL PRIZE COMPLEX’"
But reality shows otherwise, not until scientists and academics are respected in China. During COVID, politics overruled science, resulting in the Zero-COVID policy, which were brought down by widespread protests, not by science (counter evidence to the ineffectiveness of the Zero-COVID policy).
Unless you are implying that you predict a regime change by that time...
Of course the number of scholars killed is large in absolute terms and relative to the size of the Chinese research ecosystem at the time, but it's also small relative to the number of researchers worldwide at the time and to the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of Chinese scientists researching all kinds of things now, which is the result of explosive growth primarily over the past few decades.
Chen-Ning Yang was technically not wrong with his 1998 prediction, since Tu Youyou got 1/3 of the 2015 Nobel in medicine, but it didn't really make sense for him to link this to continued development, since the delay between discovery and award means that most of the prizes from 1998–2018 were for work that was already done before he made his prediction.
Over the same time frame, tertiary school enrollment went from 6.3% to 53.4%, and my 20–40-year prediction is based on a guess of how long it will take for the work of all those freshly-minted scientists to enter the range of consideration for a Nobel.
Quantity ≠ Quality.
> Chen-Ning Yang was technically not wrong with his 1998 prediction, since Tu Youyou got 1/3 of the 2015 Nobel in medicine, but it didn't really make sense for him to link this to continued development, since the delay between discovery and award means that most of the prizes from 1998–2018 were for work that was already done before he made his prediction.
Agreed. Though to nitpick, the part on “even more than one, if the country’s economic development continues at its current rate” is technically wrong, if we just count Chinese Nobel scientists developed in Mainland China (only Tu Youyou).
Chen-Ning Yang was bullish on Chinese science, but reality did not deliver.
Shing-Tung Yau is as bullish on Chinese mathematics in the future, but even he admitted that China is still decades behind in mathematical research, due to systematic issue which ‘“places too much emphasis on material rewards” and tends to encourage young researchers to work for titles instead of scientific advancements’. [1]
[1]: https://archive.is/MRDlP "China has problems to solve before its mathematics research can rise above WWII levels, scholar says"
This is a problem with the culture of science.
> China has been invaded by ... Britain (largely India)
That is such an interesting characterization of the territorial disputes between PRC(and/or ROC) and RoI.
Are you unaware of the history leading to and from the Boxer Rebellion?
The parent poster is talking about the Younghusband expedition into Tibet of 1903[1], I don't think it is the boxer rebellion in which British Indian troops had no direct involvement(AFAIK) and also those events happened before 1901 establishment of the Nobel Prize, which is the time period OP cites as the starting time range.
To see the Tibetan military expedition as an invasion of China, means to accept the Qing dynasty and its successor states (ROC,PRC)claim of sovereignty and not suzerainty over Tibet. A claim at the time which was not recognized by other countries specifically Russia, Britain and also Tibet.
The refusal of Tibetan government to accept terms of treaties they were not party to directly (i.e. the ones Qing China signed) was the official reason stated for the invasion by the British.
Either way it is a deeply contentious topic never legally settled in the 1907 agreement and had implications both to that era and modern geopolitics. No one then or now is purely looking at merits of the arguments.
The points will end up into esoteric discussion on whether is kowtowing and kneeling are the same thing, or is acknowledging supremacy is same as sovereignty, or the differences between vassal state or autonomous region or protectorate or suzerain.
Also the views of the countries/entities (or their successors) have also changed including the Tibetan government-in-exile in the last 120 years.
My knowledge of history is at best a passing student at high school level, this kind of discussion requires deep understanding of relationship of states, and of Chinese culture and language during Qing dynasty i.e. professional expertise which I certainly don't have.
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[1] My initial read was they meant either Arunachal Pradesh( South Tibet to the Chinese), Aksai Chin or the MacMohan line etc, but they clarified it wasn't the case.
The Boxer Protocol wasn't signed until September 01901 and involved permanently establishing a dozen foreign military bases inside China, so didn't, from my point of view, end the invasion. But it's true that the actual fighting was almost completely the previous year.
This was 40 years before the Republic of India was formed.
The War of 1812... when the British burned down the White House and the Capitol surely has to count as an "invasion".
That was before Nobel prize was established.
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It seems that you didn't understand the comment you were replying to, indeed having gone to great lengths to misinterpret it.
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No, you wrote that comment. The comment you misinterpreted did not say any of those things.
The research competition is basically a funding competition nowadays. In the 20th century, China had far less research funding for universities compared to U.S.. That's due to two facts: 1. China was poor back then. 2. China had barely no high-tech industries which can provide additional financial support to labs and cultivate talents.
Therefore, people got high-level education who want to pursue a research career would have less chance to get a job in China (at least mainland) and had to go to U.S., EU or Japan to utilize their knowledge.
In fact, until now, U.S. still offers the highest the research funding to its universities. That's why there're so many Chinese students in U.S. schools.
Maybe not that crazy given that most of their academic work was only published in Chinese until about 2 to 3 decades ago.
I’m sure murdering tons of academics in the cultural revolution had nothing to do with it.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
> 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.
Absolutely, I am in no way saying Mao era methods were justified, warranted or even effective.
They were misguided, ineffective, and directly or indirectly killed people in the millions.
I am just pointing out that, the atrocities of the era doesn't justify seeing pre 1960s or pre1950s years of China with rose tinted glasses as a better era, it wasn't unless you were in the elite.
It would be no different than seeing the 1970s or any earlier generation in U.S. history as a better era. Only a very small in-group perhaps had it good. Everyone else be it black, women, indigenous, various immigrants, religious, neuro or sexually diverse have only seen net improvements in last 300 years.
They were also completely unnecessary.
They were awful and achieved almost nothing but ruin, so by definition they were unnecessary.
But are you saying reform and change were unnecessary? The people of China were suffering immensely; the country had been in a state of domestic violent conflict, on and off, since before 1911 (as of 1949). The Communist Party became more corrupt.
Mao's policies and politics made all that much worse, but that doesn't mean nothing needed to be done.
China was already developing economically and technologically -- especially in coastal areas and in Manchuria (there was a large migration of Chinese to the area after it came under Japanese control).
That development would have continued.
I understand the anger and the desperation that made the Communist takeover possible but doing nothing at all and keeping all the elites in charge (instead of replacing them with new ones) would have been better.
What sources are there?
> China was already developing economically and technologically
That's an odd version of history. China just went through WWII, including the awful Japanese invasion, which interrupted a massive civil war that restarted afterward, and which followed decades without a real national government.
> there was a large migration of Chinese to the area after it came under Japanese control
Japanese control didn't work out well for Chinese people, to say the least.
> keeping all the elites in charge
The elites had led China to disaster for a century, 'the century of humiliation' it's called (though blaming outside forces, which do deserve some blame).
> replacing them with new ones
Here we agree.
> would have been better
Certainly there is no source that can more than guess at that.
The better option would have been true democratic reform. It has worked superbly well in parts of China - Taiwan and Hong Kong. It was starting to work in 1989, and leaning in that direction before Xi.
Another point about Soviet scientists: it was very often a career-ending move to accept a Nobel prize unless you were a truly untouchable cult of personality and/or direct friend of those in power. See Andrey Sakharov, who first invented the soviet hydrogen bomb and later dedicated himself to non-proliferation which earned him a Nobel Peace prize. He was however barred from traveling to Oslo to accept in 1975, having already been blacklisted from classified work since 1968.
I wonder to what extent that lead to the curbing of consideration of those behind the iron curtain.
Peace prizes are different from science prizes. The Soviet Union had no problems with its scientists getting science prizes. It did sometimes had problems with letting them leave the country to actually receive them, of course.
While your disambiguation is valid, they very much wanted to minimize the potential fallout from individuals staying in, say, a Norwegian hotel and sampling the local culture only to return and speak fondly of said trip "beyond the curtain". Usually this was outweighed by the national prestige (and subsequent propaganda opportunity) from having a Soviet Nobel recepient but the KGB had an extremely heavy hand in deciding who got to go, regardless of scientific breakthrough.
~2/3 of US Nobel Laureates have not been born in the US. This tells you that things are a bit complex to analyze. You can also take into account second generation ones.
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.
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.
Russia / 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.
TK-chinese: Needham's Chinese name is 李約瑟.
china is still not its peak yet. the tech boom only starts few years ago.