"Qian Xuesen's Question" is a pseudo-question| technology Yuan Ren

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If Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao had stayed in China, would they have won the Nobel Prize? I must not be able to get it, because there is no such scientific research condition at all.

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This video was released on November 17, 2021 and has reached 12,000 likes

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Recently, many people are circulating an article titled "He Zuoxiu: I Hope Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao will be reconciled in their lifetime." In fact, this is not an article by Academician He Zuoxiu, but a record of the reporter's interview with Teacher He and his wife, Teacher Qing Chengrui. The two senior teachers talked about a lot of interesting content, and the reporter took this sentence out as a headline, which is really not good.

Excluding the question of the party title, this interview is still valuable. In my opinion, the most valuable is the last part. They gave a clear answer to Qian Xuesen's question: This is a pseudo-question. An excerpt follows:

Q: What do you think scientists like you who have grown up in China and scientists who have achieved overseas achievements like Mr. Yang and Mr. Li have in common?

He Zuoxiu: Everyone does scientific work, and scientific work itself is the same, and it is all necessary to act in accordance with the spirit and methods of science, without any difference, but the conditions are different. They work abroad, the material conditions are much richer than ours, and the scientific research environment is much better. It is a fact that the level of the scientific environment in which they live is far more developed and advanced than ours.

After our liberation, we were poor and broken. During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the country's highest school, Southwest United University, had more than 3,000 students and teachers, which was completely incomparable with foreign countries, and we could not open many classes at all. In 1947, I was transferred from the Department of Chemistry of Shanghai Jiao Tong University to the Department of Physics of Tsinghua University, and I could not find any advanced scientific books to read. At that time, there was a Longmen Bookstore that introduced some foreign books, which were very expensive, even pirated copies were very expensive, and students couldn't read them at all. You can't imagine how backward China was at that time. This backward productivity also determines that the scientists in our country are incomparable with the United States and the West.

Qing Chengrui: Although we also produced Yang Zhenning, Li Zhengdao, and Wu Jianxiong, they were produced on the scientific soil of the United States. It should be said that in the scientific soil, we are incomparable with the scientific level of the West, let alone that the creativity of our Chinese must be higher than that of foreign countries.

There is a "Qian Xuesen's question" - "Why can't China's higher education system produce world-class masters of science?" "It's actually a pseudo-question. The high level of Li Zhengdao and Yang Zhenning, I personally think it has nothing to do with China's Southwest United University education system, because both of them were originally talented, good students in China, good students running abroad, and the standards of good students are the same in all places. However, because China was engaged in the War of Resistance Against Japan, the Southwest United Congress also had the opportunity to concentrate the best talents in the country. But it is indeed related to the level of education of the school, and there are indeed good and bad differences between different schools.

He Zuoxiu: Someone asked a question, if Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao had stayed in China and wondered what would have developed later, would they have won the Nobel Prize? I replied that it must be 100% impossible to get, because there is no such scientific research condition at all. At that time, that is, in 1956, we could not even get scientific information from abroad in time. The universe is not conserved, we can't even find the phenomenon, and there is no such condition for Mr. Wu Jianxiong to do a scientific experiment at a low temperature. This means that the environment and conditions of the country are very important.

Qing Chengrui: Some people think that we have invested a lot of money and cultivated a lot of talents in recent years, and that China's science is no longer good, which is not a fact at all. In our theoretical physics industry, the level is much higher than in the past, but it is still early to say that it has surpassed the United States, or has caught up with the United States. For example, if you go to the hospital to see a doctor, more than 95% of the medical equipment you use is produced and imported from abroad. Those devices are all the basic principles of physics, those means of inspection, and all the means of physics, do we Chinese physicists contribute to it?

Those big devices were all imported, including the hearing aids on the ears of both of us, sorry, but also from abroad. I wore a hearing aid in my ear, and there was a small chip, and a small sensor, and then I enlarged it, and that's it, and there were four companies in the world monopolized, and China had no share. We're harder to get into now, why? Because it has patent control.

He Zuoxiu: My hearing aid is sold single (taken from the ear to show), do you know how much money is one? More than 40,000 yuan a piece, this set of two is almost 100,000 yuan, but the origin is from Denmark, which is a small country and a high-level country. This is called high technology.

Qing Chengrui: Chinese physicists have not contributed at all to these.

[Yuan Lanfeng's note: The contribution of Chinese physicists to the principle of medical equipment, which was originally almost non-existent, will now appear one: nuclear magnetic resonance with zero magnetic field, developed by Academician Du Jiangfeng and Professor Peng Xinhua of the University of Science and Technology of China, see my popular science book "A Brief Introduction to Quantum Information". 】

We have developed physics for so many years, we have trained a large number of teachers, this is a fact, but also sent out a large number of excellent students, slowly began to grow, at least these things we can take over the production, and before this skill did not have. Some advanced large-scale instruments have also begun to be trial-produced and improved, but the original things are all foreign.

To change this situation, first, it is not easy, and it depends on long-term continuous efforts and struggles. Second, the most important thing is, first of all, to vigorously develop the economy and take economic construction as the central task. It is also necessary to continue to increase investment in science and technology. But to produce a large number of outstanding scientists, even masters, this is not something that can be achieved in three or five years.