October 1 is National Day, and it is also the birthday of the famous physicist Yang Zhenning, who just turned 100 this year.
A book says of him: Mr. Yang has done a lot of things for the motherland, but he is not willing to say it. But it is this unwilling to say that many people on the Internet have a lot of misunderstandings about Mr. Yang Zhenning. Some people say that Yang Zhenning has such a cow? Why isn't it mentioned in physics textbooks? Some people say that Qian Xuesen and Deng Jiaxian have returned to serve the motherland in the last century, but how did he become a citizen of the United States?
Today, I will answer one by one, how good is Yang Zhenning. Let's take a look at this photo first:
This is a group photo of the top scientists in the field of physics research in the world, before, such a group photo stood in the C position was Einstein, after Einstein's death, this position was Yang Zhenning's.
On October 1, 1956, he and Lee Jeong-do proposed the "law of non-conservation of cosmology", a discovery that caused a huge shock to the physics community at that time, and the following year, the Nobel Prize was awarded to both of them. Later, Yang Zhenning and his students proposed the "Yang Mills Theory". In 1979, 1999, 2004, and 2013, many Nobel Prizes in physics were related to this theory, and it was called the Petri dish of the Nobel Prize.
In 2000, the journal Nature selected the greatest physicists of mankind in the past thousand years, Newton, Einstein, Maxwell and a bunch of other big men, a total of more than 20 people on the list, and Yang Zhenning is the only living physicist on this list. The evaluation of him by the authoritative physics community in the United States is: Yang Zhenning is the third physics all-round in the 20th century after Einstein and Fermi.
The greatest physicist of the millennium, Tu Hong, is Yang Zhenning
Then the question arises, why is such a great physicist not mentioned in textbooks? The main reason is that Yang Zhenning's physics formula is too esoteric to be read in textbooks, and his things are basically untouchable if you don't read a doctor of physics.
Yang Zhenning's academic cattle are beyond doubt, but on the issue of his patriotism, we speak with facts. In the 1950s, Yang Zhenning, who walked onto the Nobel Prize podium with a Chinese passport, said a few paragraphs after receiving the award, first of all, he denounced the invasion of China by many European countries and the US army many years ago, barbaric killing, shameless plunder, and after the reprimand, he also added that I am proud of my Chinese lineage and background.
Let's explain why he became an American citizen again. Yang Zhenning explained this problem in an interview that the first research project at that time was basically a high-end physics theory, but it completely lacked scientific research conditions in China. Second, due to the widespread influence of Truman Doctrine at that time, he was often shut out of some laboratories because of his nationality, so in 1964, Yang Zhenning became a citizen of the United States. Because of this incident, even his father, the famous mathematician Yang Wuzhi, could not accept it.
After Yang Zhenning became a citizen of the United States, he could have done research and learning on the other side of the ocean without distraction, and enjoyed the local good life. But after the "ping-pong diplomacy" broke the deadlock in 1971, Yang Zhenning immediately returned to his homeland after a 26-year absence. After he returned, the first people he urgently wanted to see were his hair boys, classmates, comrades-in-arms, and Deng Jiaxian, the founder of the two bombs.
Since then, Yang Zhenning has also traveled between China and the United States almost every year to carry out academic cooperation with domestic researchers and promote scientific exchanges. At the same time, under his needle lead, many academic leaders in the United States have also returned to China to work, including the famous mathematician Lin Jiaqiao, who resigned as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and returned to China to promote the rapid development of applied mathematics and fluid mechanics. Yao Zhizhi, a famous computer god and winner of the "Turing Award", returned to China to create the famous Tsinghua "Yao Class", and the professional ranking was once the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.
After Yang Zhenning returned to China after restoring his Chinese nationality, he personally did research in the laboratory and taught university physics classes to Tsinghua freshmen, not only rejecting Tsinghua's million annual salary, but also selling his mobile real estate in the United States, donating $6 million to Tsinghua. He has participated in the construction of more than 60 physics laboratories in China, and advocated and initiated foundations such as the Tsinghua Education Foundation of North America and the Advanced Academic Research Center of Sun Yat-sen University. He published more than 30 SCI papers in the name of Tsinghua University, which raised the scientific research level of condensed matter physics of cold atoms in China for decades.
In 2021, that is, last year, the 99-year-old Mr. Yang Zhenning was elected as one of the "Top Ten People Who Moved China". There is a passage of the award speech that says: You have contributed to the world so profoundly, not many people understand it, and you have dedicated so much innocence to the motherland, we all understand.
As for whether the keyboard heroes can understand, in fact, it is not important, those sneers are destined to be fleeting, but the name Yang Zhenning will surely continue to shine after a hundred years.