Chen Ning Yang

Chen Ning Yang (born September 22, 1922, Hofei, Anhwei, China) is a Chinese-born American theoretical physicist whose research with Tsung-Dao Lee showed that parity—the symmetry between physical phenomena occurring in right-handed and left-handed coordinate systems—is violated when certain elementary particles decay. Until this discovery it had been assumed by physicists that parity symmetry was as universal a law as the conservation of energy or electric charge. This and other studies in particle physics earned Yang and Lee the Nobel Prize for Physics for 1957.

Life

Yang’s father, Yang Ko-chuen (also known as Yang Wu-chih), was a professor of mathematics at Tsinghua University, near Peking. While still young, Yang read the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and adopted “Franklin” as his first name. After graduation from the Southwest Associated University, in K’unming, he took his B.Sc. in 1942 and his M.S. in 1944. On a fellowship, he studied in the United States, enrolling at the University of Chicago in 1946. He took his Ph.D. in nuclear physics with Edward Teller and then remained in Chicago for a year as an assistant to Enrico Fermi, the physicist who was probably the most influential in Yang’s scientific development. Lee had also come to Chicago on a fellowship, and the two men began the collaboration that led eventually to their Nobel Prize work on parity. In 1949 Yang went to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and became a professor there in 1955. He became a U.S. citizen in 1964.

Work

Almost from his earliest days as a physicist, Yang had made significant contributions to the theory of the weak interactions—the forces long thought to cause elementary particles to disintegrate. (The strong forces that hold nuclei together and the electromagnetic forces that are responsible for chemical reactions are parity-conserving. Since these are the dominant forces in most physical processes, parity conservation appeared to be a valid physical law, and few physicists before 1955 questioned it.) By 1953 it was recognized that there was a fundamental paradox in this field since one of the newly discovered mesons—the so-called K meson—seemed to exhibit decay modes into configurations of differing parity. Since it was believed that parity had to be conserved, this led to a severe paradox.

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Physics and Natural Law

After exploring every conceivable alternative, Lee and Yang were forced to examine the experimental foundations of parity conservation itself. They discovered, in early 1956, that, contrary to what had been assumed, there was no experimental evidence against parity nonconservation in the weak interactions. The experiments that had been done, it turned out, simply had no bearing on the question. They suggested a set of experiments that would settle the matter, and, when these were carried out by several groups over the next year, large parity-violating effects were discovered. In addition, the experiments also showed that the symmetry between particle and antiparticle, known as charge conjugation symmetry, is also broken by the weak decays. (See also CP violation.)

In addition to his work on weak interactions, Yang, in collaboration with Lee and others, carried out important work in statistical mechanics—the study of systems with large numbers of particles—and later investigated the nature of elementary particle reactions at extremely high energies. From 1965 Yang was Albert Einstein professor at the Institute of Science, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Long Island. During the 1970s he was a member of the board of Rockefeller University and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and, from 1978, of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego. He was also on the board of Ben-Gurion University, Beersheba, Israel. He received the Einstein Award in 1957 and the Rumford Prize in 1980; in 1986 he received the Liberty Award and the National Medal of Science.