Author: Yang Zhenning, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
Source: Independent Spirit (Journal_of_Thu)
First, Chinese is a poetic language
I really don't have anything to prepare, I want to talk about it in this way, I will start with this "untitled rambling". It's a first-aid, but elegant subject. In fact, you must have already felt that the name of Chinese movie is more poetic than the name of an English movie. When I was studying at Southwest United University, my classmates often went to see a movie called "The Great Waltz", which Chinese translated as "Spring Dawn of Cuidi"; another movie, "Waterloo Bridge", Chinese translated as "Soul Breaking Blue Bridge". How beautiful! If you think about it, this is no accident, because the structure of the Chinese has its own special place, and with Chinese it is easy to produce poetic articles, poetic idioms, or poetic words. Why? I don't know if there is a monograph on it, but if not, I think it's a very important topic. I'm not a student of philology, but I think it's closely related to the origin of Chinese characters. Because everyone knows that the beginning of Chinese characters is very likely to be related to divination, divination uses one or two words to represent a fate, this fate can be the fate of the world, it can be a natural fate, for example, the king wants to go on a crusade, how the weather is, he has to divinate in advance. Divination is sometimes done with tortoiseshells, and a crack is a word, which gives rise to the I Ching. There are sixty-four trigrams in the I Ching, and each of them represents many things, from astronomical geography to what happens in the world. I think this is a very important factor in the origin of Chinese culture; and this factor is closely related to the later formation of monosyllabic Chinese characters. After becoming a monosyllabic Chinese character, an aesthetic point of view was produced, that is, simplification. "During the Qingming Festival, it rains a lot, and pedestrians on the road want to break their souls." Asking where the restaurant was, the shepherd boy pointed to the apricot blossom village. Some say that the poem is too long, and its poetry can be expressed in a shorter way, "The rain is pouring, the soul is broken, where there is, the apricot blossom village." This kind of game is very common in the Chinese tradition and has a close relationship with the characteristics of Chinese culture. Chinese poetry is simply short, much shorter than English poetry. This is a characteristic of Chinese culture. The structure of the Chinese characters is closely related to the monophonic Chinese characters, and to today's China is so large a territory, so large a population, and it is a country. I want to study the humanities, read Chinese literature, read Chinese history, and there are many things that can be excavated here.
Poster of "Spring Dawn in the Green Causeway"
Second, Mr. Feng Youlan's "old state and new life" should continue
When I was a child at Tsinghua University for 8 years, and now after more than 60 years, I have returned to my hometown, and my life is not like walking a big circle, but really walking a big circle. I moved back to Tsinghua University last winter. In 1929, when I was 7 years old, because my father was a professor at Tsinghua University, our family moved to Tsinghua University, and we lived at No. 11 West Courtyard. Mr. Feng Youlan's family moved to Tsinghua University in 1928, and during my 8 years at Tsinghua University, I often heard my father talk about admiring Mr. Feng Youlan, but I don't remember any contact with Mr. Feng Youlan in Tsinghua Garden. Then the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression began, from 1938 to 1942, I was a bachelor's degree at the Southwest United University in Kunming, Mr. Feng Youlan was a very famous professor at that time, I never chose a class in the Philosophy Department, but I once secretly went to his class to listen to it once or twice, maybe the history of Chinese philosophy or something, I just wanted to hear how Mr. Feng Youlan gave a lecture. If you look at Mr. Feng Youlan's article, because his ancient cultivation is very good, his article is half text and half white, which has the effect of streamlining and having a clear and organized role. Everyone may know that Mr. Feng Youlan is stuttering, and people who stutter are usually not easy to have a good eloquence, but when you go to listen to his lessons, you have an impression that Mr. Feng Youlan is good at using stuttering to produce very effective speeches. It is useful when he pauses, and it is very effective to infiltrate what he has just said into your mind when he pauses, and then suddenly come to a conclusion. I later read many articles by Mr. Feng Youlan, and the "Self-Introduction to Sansongtang" written by him in his later years is a very interesting article.
I went to the United States in 1945, and when the Southwest United Congress was dissolved in 1946, Mr. Feng Youlan wrote a monument to the Southwest United University, which now has a replica at Peking University. The original stele exists in Kunming, the former site of the Southwest United University, and now Yunnan Normal University. In the "Self-Introduction of the Three Song Hall", Mr. Feng Youlan included this inscription, and it was obvious that he was very proud of this inscription. This inscription is very well written, and the spirit of the Southwest United Congress, the significance of the Southwest United Congress, and the influence of the Southwest United Congress are all vividly written.
Inscription of the Southwest United University
The last time I saw Mr. Feng Youlan was in the late 1980s or early 1990s, at Columbia University. He had studied there before and given him a special honorary degree because the West recognized Mr. Feng Youlan as a master of Chinese philosophy and the history of Chinese philosophy in the 20th century. He was accompanied by his daughter Feng Zhongpu (a literary artist with the pen name Zong Pu), who invited me to a meal at the Chinese Consulate General in New York. In the 90s, I read Mr. Feng Youlan's "Self-Introduction to Sansongtang", as I just said, this is a very good book, I especially like a word in it, this is Mr. Feng Youlan invented, called "old state new life". He has a characteristic of making a word that synthesizes many ideas, which appears repeatedly in his books. "Old state and new destiny" means that the Chinese nation has been a state since the Shang Zhou Dynasty, and now it has a new destiny.
After reading his books, I often have such an idea, Mr. Feng Youlan has been dead for almost 10 years, and China has undergone tremendous changes in the past 10 years, and I think that if Mr. Feng Youlan can prolong his life, the term "old state and new life" may be added to him, because these 10 years of development have made him possible to continue to talk about "old state and new life".
Feng Youlan
Third, how to view China's modern and contemporary history
According to the Internet, I participated in a new York City event to commemorate the 110th anniversary of Mao Zedong's birth. No way. I was in China at the time, I didn't attend any events in New York City, and there was a lot of mess on the Internet, especially what I saw in the United States about China.
I watched the TV series "Ode to Yan'an" yesterday. I wonder if you have seen it? It's a good acting, it's about some of the situations in Yan'an from 1935 to 1945, and I guess eighty percent of it's true. I think that was the most successful era for Mao Zedong. At that time, if there had been no Mao Zedong, there would have been no later development of the Chinese nation. In the early 1980s or the late 1970s, Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang presided over a document in which they had an appraisal of Mao Zedong's historical status, "merit is greater than excess." From a distance, I think this assessment is correct, and in another 100 years there will be more people who will agree, because without Mao Zedong there would be no China today. As for Deng Xiaoping, everyone knows better that without Deng Xiaoping there would be no China today. Therefore, I think that in the first century or two centuries, everyone will think that Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping are the great men of the 20th century, because the rise of China is the most important historical fact of the 20th century, and no matter what mistakes they have made, this historical fact cannot be forgotten.
Mao Zedong
If I look at it on the Internet, there are a lot of people who will scold me, because many people know that Mao Zedong made a big mistake. I am from Anhui, and many people died in Anhui during the three-year disaster, which is a fact that no one can deny. If a person's father was starved to death at that time, or was killed during the Cultural Revolution, it is normal for him to disagree with me. But history is complicated, and The history of China is particularly very complicated, and I think people who disagree with me very much have a tendency to absolutize many things, and after absolutization, it is of course easy to find out what is wrong with Mao Zedong. If you bite this point and hold on, of course, nothing else can be discussed.
How to understand contemporary Chinese society, now is the best era or the worst era. I think the reason why students ask this question must be that there are polarized opinions when everyone discusses. I think it's clear that this is the best of times. Why do I say this, when I was born in 1922, my father's generation (my father was born in 1896), today's 20-year-old people have not experienced that era, can not fully understand the mentality of the intellectuals of that era, nor can they understand the fate of the entire Chinese nation in everyone's minds at that time. If you compare the mentality of people back then to people today, this historical shift is an astonishing and almost unbelievable shift. I have said that in the future, if we discuss which things are the most important in the history of mankind in the 20th century and which things have the greatest impact on human history; I think it is not the two world wars, not the rise and fall of Hitler, not the Great Revolution of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. These are, of course, important things, but I don't think they have had the greatest impact on human history. The most important two are that mankind has learned to use science and technology to enhance productivity, which is unprecedented in these 100 years and will continue to develop; the second is the rise of the Chinese nation. The importance of these two things will become clearer in another 50 or 100 years. If you agree, you will agree with what I just said, among the greatest figures of the 20th century, there must be Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, without whom the whole world would be different today, so the answer to this question is very clear, that is, it is very good.
I'm moving to China now, and if I think China is very bad, I wouldn't have moved to China.
Deng Xiaoping
Fourth, the great transformation of the Chinese nation in the 20th century should be described by a novel or epic with long-term value
Now China's publishing industry has developed greatly. I remember it was difficult to publish a book 15 years ago because there was a lack of paper. Now when I go to Haidian Book City, there are simply too many books of all kinds, and there are too many novels. Meaningful novels, meaningless novels; meaningful articles, meaningless articles, are everywhere. I think now is a good opportunity, because the 20th century is a big era for the Chinese nation, and the Chinese nation has changed from a poor and bullied to a position that can no longer be miserable to today, and this transformation is unprecedented. Such a big transformation should be described by a novel or epic with long-term value. I haven't seen a book like that come out yet. Of course, this is not an easy thing to do, but I think that no matter what everyone does, there are always many conditions, and a very important condition is to have a chance. What I mean just now is an opportunity for people who do literature, and it can be said that there is now a topic, which is very big, very broad. If any of my classmates here can write a big, big "Scope" novel like "War and Peace" or "Doctor Zhivago" in 30 or 50 years, if I can't see it, many of you here can see it.
I have lived in China for more than 20 years and in the United States for almost 60 years, and I have a personal feeling about the similarities and differences between the two cultures. Western values certainly have a lot of influence on me, and I also have some understanding and choices about the values of this culture. There are many things in the West that are advanced and have permanent value. And there are some oriental things that also have permanent value. As you know, about a decade ago, Lee Kuan Yew put forward Asian values, a concept that has been criticized by the American media, but I think he is right. I think today the whole world is influenced by the Western media, and these influences are sometimes unconscious. I think it would be unfortunate to have unconsciously absorbed the influence of the Western media in its entirety. There are many people who have admired or been assimilated because of the success of Western material civilization.
A very important thing happening in the world now is the rise of the Chinese nation, especially in 30, 50, 100 years, the conflict and integration between these two cultures will be a major event in the 21st century, which is worth thinking more about among the students here. This era is also a good opportunity to express your own views, to develop your own career, to create epics or novels with great strokes.
Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace
Fifth, the relationship between science and humanities
During the summer vacation from the first to the second year of junior high school, my father said to Professor Lei Haizong of the History Department of Tsinghua University, can you recommend a high-talented student in your department. He recommended a man named Ding Zeliang, who was indeed a high-caliber student at that time and taught me Mencius for a summer vacation. I remember very clearly that my father's office was in the Science Museum, the building next to the Great Hall. Because the building is relatively high, the place is cooler in the summer, and every day Mr. Ding and I talk about "Mencius" for an hour. One summer I didn't finish teaching, and then the second summer I taught another summer or half summer. So, I could have taken Mencius from beginning to end. Just now, a classmate asked if this had any impact on me. Of course, for example, Mencius said, "A family of eight can be free of hunger", and the background here certainly makes me more aware of what traditional Chinese concepts are. I absorbed the spirit of Chinese culture, I think it is much more absorbed than those who have never read Mencius.
Then, just now this classmate said that you are reading science, how do you deal with the two different development directions of science and humanities, and how to achieve harmony. You know that 30 years ago, C.P. Snow in the United Kingdom wrote a book called "Two Cultures", and he was talking about it. At that time in Europe, in the United States, and in China today, there was a phenomenon that because government-funded research paid more attention to science and industry, and not so much attention to humanities. So, it was in this context that C.P. Snow wrote such a book.
C.P.Snow
From a personal point of view, I think that a person who reads science or engineering, he wants to eat, and at the same time has seven passions and six desires, so it is impossible not to have a relationship with humanities. As for how to deal with this matter, under different circumstances and under different social backgrounds, of course, it is different. Just now a classmate asked me, I think it can also be said that before the age of twenty or thirty, I paid less attention to humanistic issues, and at that time, my upper and subconscious considerations were mostly in science. As I get older, I think this is also the experience of most people who study science.
Is there a conflict between the two? I think there is a conflict in the distribution of time, but of course there is no conflict, and it is very interesting to discuss the relationship between the two. For example, I once wrote an article "Beauty and Physics", a topic that I think should be played, and I will continue to play when I have the opportunity. Because there is beauty in science, this concept of beauty has the same place as the concept of beauty in literature and the concept of beauty in art, and there are different places. If you study it carefully, I think it's a very interesting thing. I know that there have been many works in the East and the West in aesthetics, and I don't know if they have discussed this issue, I think this is a very good topic.
A classmate asked if the overall concept of the development of world history had any impact on my daily physics research, and asked me if I had read Mencius and whether it had had an impact on my decades of physics research. This is a difficult question to answer. The reason is that you look at one or two people, and sometimes you can't see it. However, there are many countries in the world now, do you see that many Japanese people do research in a very special place, and what americans and Germans do is very different? It's a little different. This difference is not because some people have read Mencius, others have not read Mencius; some people have read Goethe, others have not read Goethe, so there will be a different place. There's a traditional problem here. If there is a Yukawa Hideki in Japan, he studies any problem, his students will follow him, consciously or unconsciously learn from him, which affects its development, and the influence of culture in this development is not necessarily very large, but the influence of several masters is very large. Obviously, around 1950, Hua Luogeng returned, and the pioneers of Chinese mathematics were basically his students. What he likes to study, the method he likes to study, has left a footprint in the Chinese mathematical community, and this influence is greater than the influence of the entire cultural tradition. But to ask whether culture has an impact, I think there is also a point, for example, Germans have a tendency to ask logical questions. The French also asked, but were less focused. So, to ask whether culture has an impact on scientific research, I think there is, but most importantly, it is a traditional question.
Statue of Mencius
Modern disciplines will not melt into one
Some students said that they knew that I had said a sentence, and there are two kinds of modern mathematics books, one can't read after reading one page, and one can't read the first sentence. Indeed I have said this because I have personal experience. After the middle of the 20th century, the book of mathematics became more and more streamlined, and more and more naked logic was put on the outermost side, so although its logical system was correct, when you looked at it, it did not know in what direction it was going, so it was very ugly. I meant to describe the feeling when I said that. This development also exists in physics, and the physics articles of the early 20th century are relatively long, and now they are getting shorter and more difficult to understand. At the beginning of the 20th century, if you didn't do it for two years in a field, and then read future articles, you can quickly make up for it. Now you haven't looked at it for two years, and when you look at it again, you don't understand what it's talking about, because within two years there has been a new development, and the new development has been spoken out by them in very condensed language. If you don't look at the literature from start to finish in two years, you don't understand what it was written later. This is a common disease in the world, it is difficult to have a reversal, why, because now there is a lot of literature, the number of scientists in the world I don't know if anyone has studied, I think it is 10 times more than 100 years ago. I think that in this situation, people can't read long stories, so the more you write, the easier it is.
Just now, a classmate said that a friend told him that mathematics and physics, philosophy – especially now with the development of interdisciplinary disciplines – will melt into one in the future? No, it won't. It's a fact that mathematics and physics have intersected a lot over the years, but every field, where they intersect, is only (I think maybe) — five percent. Five percent of today's mathematics is closely related to physics, and five percent of today's physics is closely related to mathematics. This five percent repetition, where math and physics intersect, is now getting bigger and bigger every year. However, the places that do not intersect are also getting bigger and bigger, and the ratio of five percent will not change much for a while. Under such a premise, it is impossible to talk about mathematics and physics going together.
David Hilbert
As for philosophy, this is actually a very important thing in the 20th century, that is, in the early 20th century, through the efforts of several mathematicians and philosophers, the most important of which was perhaps the largest German mathematician in the world at that time, named David Hilbert, who wanted to logicalize mathematics. You've all studied Euclid's geometry, and you're talking about geometry in terms of logic, and Hilbert is going to logicalize the whole mathematics. Bertrand Russell, who was greatly influenced by him, was also a philosopher and won the Nobel Prize in literature. Some of Russell's contributions from a logical point of view are not the most important. The field was later developed in such a way that around 1930 a German graduate student wrote an article that proved it, saying that Hilbert's idea that it was impossible to base the whole mathematics in a logical system, called Gödel's Incomplete theorem. This, I think, is a major development in the history of human thought, and it has since influenced the development of the whole logic. Its impact on the development of mathematics is not so great, because the inability to logicalize the whole mathematics completely absolutely does not mean that traditional mathematics cannot continue to develop. So if you ask a mathematician today whether Gödel's contribution is important, he must say yes; if it has had a very important impact on mathematics today, I think you will put it aside, and mathematics will continue to develop as it used to be. This direction developed by Gödel is called mathematical logic, which later became very closely related to computer programs. One of the things that we at the Center for Advanced Study of Tsinghua University are very happy about is that we have invited one of the world's largest authorities in this field, a professor named Yao Zhizhi, to live at Tsinghua University this fall. He is now a chair professor at Princeton University, where he received the Turing Prize the year before. If someone asks who is the most important mathematical logic in the 20th century, and who are the three most important people in basic software principles, that is, Gödel, Turing, and von Neumann, all three of them are no longer here, and they later set up a Turing Prize in this field, which commemorates Turing, and Yao Zhizhi got this Turing Prize a few years ago, and I think that the people who engaged in computer software at Tsinghua University must be very happy to invite Yao Zhizhi. And what Yao Zhizhi did, just like the contribution of Gödel just mentioned, can be said to be extended.
Gödel
7. How liberal arts students learn science
We know Qian Zhongshu, who failed in mathematics. Under the Chinese tradition, at a school like Tsinghua University, I suspect that liberal arts students are likely to study physics or chemistry. If a student in Chinese studies physics, he probably has a tendency to think that it is too difficult. It's easy for me to believe this, because I just talked about China's cultural traditions and that Tsinghua University has so many very good students, and these two things add up, I'm afraid the course will be too difficult. If the school had asked me, I would have said that I don't think liberal arts students need to read so many complicated things. Physics has some spirit, probably the spirit is understood, I think it is enough. Qian Zhongshu's failure in mathematics had nothing to do with his later achievements. As for the recitation of calculus, it can be taught to make the students of the liberal arts acceptable. Calculus is a wonderful thing, and if you can absorb the wonderful spirit, I think my classmates will appreciate it.
Money Bell Book
I was 20 years old
When I was 20 years old, I had just finished my fourth grade at Southwest United University. What hung over my mind all day long at that time was physics and mathematics. Physics and mathematics, of course, have countless things that can be mined and understood. At that time, although it was very poor, Southwest United University had enough books at that time, so I had fun and had no problem. Most of my friends are physics. We talk about physical things all day long, and of course everyday life issues are an important part of the equation.
Was I involved in the political movements of the time? I was very involved. At that time, the underground work of the Communist Party was very powerful, and there were many posters, which were written by progressive students at that time. Later I learned that many of these progressive students were underground party members. However, there are also some posters of the Three Youth Leagues, which is an organization run by the Kuomintang. Of course, I see these posters a lot. I didn't write in any posters at the time because it wasn't something I was thinking about all day at the time.
Do I have a love story? The Hong Kong government's RTHK (Radio and Television of Hong Kong) TVB made an outstanding Chinese series, producing three or four episodes a year, and in 1998 sent a female director named Tang Minming, and they went to my home in the United States two or three times, and came to Tsinghua University once or twice, shooting a one-hour film. There is a passage in this hour's film, Ms. Tang asked, Professor Yang, did you have a love story when you were in Kunming? I said yes and gave her a picture. This photo is of a girl in my class at southwest United University at that time, surnamed Zhang. I was just 17 years old. At that time, everyone in the Southwest United University was dressed very plainly, wearing blue cloth coats, but Zhang Jingzhao often wore a red coat, which was very eye-catching. I noticed. I remember where I learned that she was in a classroom at 10 o'clock in the morning, so at 11 o'clock in the morning, I wandered around that classroom, and when she came out, I wanted to talk to her. She was a maths student, and my father was the head of the maths department. So, she sometimes comes to my house. At that time, my parents also liked her very much, after a few months of dating, I thought about it, Zhang Jingzhao had a very bad influence on me, my own emotions used to be like a very calm lake, and after Zhang Jingzhao came, now it fluctuates very badly. It's not good for myself. For me, the thing I was supposed to do at the time was to study hard and not think about the girlfriends. So, then our relationship gradually faded. This is arguably the first and only time I met Du Zhili, the story of my future wife.
Yang Zhenning and Du zhili wedding photos
Two days ago I saw a book called "College Past", which collected twenty or thirty authors to recall their four years of university life, and also selected an article about Southwest United University. I flipped through it and found it to be interesting. I think everyone here will find it interesting. Why? Because it tells the memories of generations of people in the 20th century about their college life. From Hu Shi and Xu Zhimo, to Ji Xianlin, to me, to later generations, until the 1990s. Like a photo book, you see how much china went through in the 20th century. Like Hu Shi's visit to the United States, his memories are mainly about how he absorbed the spirit of American democracy when he was a student at Cornell University. What I have been talking about in my generation is the very hard life of the Southwest United University. Later, for example, after the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and before liberation, the influence of the open and secret struggles between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party in the schools. Then there are some descriptions of the three antis and five antis, and then there are the times of the anti-Rightist, the Four Qing, and the Cultural Revolution. By the 1980s. It was rare to discuss love in memories before. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, many students were talking about love, which I think represented the differences of each era.
Ji Xianlin and others "College Past"
Nine, a few interesting books
My classmates asked me to cite the books that had the deepest impact on me, one in English and one Chinese. This is a difficult question to answer because there are so many books in the world. But I think I can put it another way and recommend a few interesting books.
Let's start with math. When I was in my freshman year of college, my father borrowed from the library a copy of Pure Mathematics, which was written by a great British mathematician in the early 20th century. For all the mathematics in the world starts out like teaching children 1, 2, 3, 4, decimal points, fractions, but there is no attention to the whole logical system. The whole approach of the book began with a logical system, which made me, who was 16 years old at the time, suddenly understand that there could be another way of thinking about the structure of mathematics, which was a great inspiration for me.
G.H. Hardy's Pure Mathematics
Hardy's book is very famous, equivalent to the degree of mathematics in the first and second years of college, but it draws on the spirit of modern mathematics and is recommended to anyone who is interested in mathematics. There may be very few such people here today, but you may become interested in another of his books. The book is called A Mathematician's Apology. It's a quip, he means (he just said it throughout the book), that he thinks that mathematics is pure art and useless. He said the proudest thing in his life was that he hadn't done anything useful. He was very good at writing, so he wrote such a simple sentence into a small book. This little book I think is very well written from a literary standpoint, and there are a lot of little stories in it. Just now I talked about Mr. Feng Youlan, Mr. Feng Youlan is very good at writing. There are also many little stories in his book on philosophy.
G.H. Hardy's Apology by an Arithmetic
I also recommend a book related to science to everyone, written by Watson. You know the most important biological discovery of the 20th century was the Double Helix. Watson, a young American, and an Englishman 10 years his senior named Crick (both of whom are still alive today) wrote an article in 1953 about the structure of DNA as a double helix. This article is now recognized as the most important biological article of the 20th century, and I think it will be compared with Darwin's theory of evolution in the 19th century. In the 1960s, maybe the 1950s, both of them won the Nobel Prize for it. Then a few years later, Watson wrote a little book called Double Helix. I believe that there must be more than one translation of this book in China.
The book is very good. Why is it good? It is not because he has made their invention very clear, but mainly because he has never understood this sentence, but when you think about it, you know that he wants to talk about this matter - it means that the study of biology does not require reading a lot of books, as long as you are willing to work hard, bold, not afraid of the sky, and rush into it, you will produce results. This is an analysis of his own success when he wrote this book. You know that he later did some quite important work. But he didn't do much research since 1960. He ran a Coldsrping Harbor laboratory, which is a world-famous laboratory. In the past 10 years, he has initiated the study of the genome of DNA, which is a very important research in recent years. He later contributed greatly to the study of biology and to the study of the order of genetic factors in DNA around the world.
James D. Watson
I especially recommend this book to you, because if you want to know the contrast between Chinese and Western cultures, after reading this book, you can understand how a young American can nakedly express their cultural characteristics. I believe that after reading it, the students here must feel that on the one hand, there is something very important here, and it is worth any Chinese deep thinking, but there are also undesirable. For example, the description of Rosalind Franklin in the book was later criticized in the United States. Watson was able to make such an important contribution because they peeked at a photo. This photograph was not an experiment with the two of them, but by a female biologist named Rosalind Franklin. Rosalind Franklin was a very cautious biologist. After she took that picture, it wasn't enough, she had to take another picture, hoping to be able to take it more accurately. That's her personality, which is revered in academia. As a result, the two of them used a supposedly improper means to get a photo. They were impatient, and the research institute wrote this article. Many years later, when he wrote The Double Helix, he said something to Franklin's people that he shouldn't have said. He said Franklin was unsmiling and an "old maid." In the West, the meaning of the term old virgin does not exist in China, and I do not know enough about the traditional Chinese culture's view of the old maid, but in the West this is a very clear derogatory term, and it should be said that it is more than a derogatory word. At that time, the stockings were not woven as they are now, there was a line in the back, and he said that the back of the socks that Franklin wore was always not straight. His books were full of such words, so he was later criticized very badly, and people said that the straight line of Franklin's socks had nothing to do with her work. From this little thing you can see the writing style of his book.
Rosalind Franklin
What I want to talk about is that there are many people like him in the United States, how he succeeded, what are the elements, good and bad, in this book. You want to understand the characteristics of American culture, and I suggest you take a look. I know some biologists, and one of them told me that he was originally studying physics, and after reading Watson's book, he changed to biology and did a good job. I was already studying physics when I read this book, so it didn't affect my later research work.
James D. Watson's Double Helix
When I was a child, I didn't understand "Dream of the Red Chamber", and I had no interest after reading it, I think this is probably a lot of middle school students have this idea, what does it mean to talk about some things? It wasn't until I got older that I realized it was a masterpiece, and the older I got, the more I learned about these things. But what impact it had on me is hard to say.
I came back to Tsinghua University to read a lot of very interesting books, such as "Once Upon a Time in College" just introduced. There is another female writer named Nie Hualing, who was born in 1925 and may have visited Tsinghua University. She recently wrote an autobiography called "Three Lives and Three Lives," which is very well written. Of course, when she was young, she had a hard to imagine experience, her so-called three lives, meaning that she graduated from a university in Wuhan and Chongqing, and then in Nanjing, which was her first twenty years, a lifetime; then she went to Taiwan, in Taiwan for more than ten years, to be an editor of a magazine, the second life; and then to the United States, thirty or forty years, three lives. She's very good at writing, and I think the book is likely to turn into a movie in the future because it's good film material.
Another book I read, which also came out recently, was written by a very close friend of mine, a very successful historian named He Bingdi. He Bingdi studied history at Tsinghua University from 1934 to 1937, and he later went to the United States with me. I think he is now the most famous Chinese historian in the United States, and he wrote a book called "Sixty Years of Reading History", which has a very interesting description of Tsinghua University in the 1930s and the Southwest United University in the 1930s and 1940s, and some of the people and events in the later American study of Chinese history. There are many biographies like this one now.
He Bingdi
I am trying to transcend the limit of what is limited in the human world
Let's take an example of the difference between Chinese and Western cultures. I think Chinese culture is humanistic culture, and Western culture is God-oriented culture. What does God mean? Everyone has his own God; all are called God, but everyone has his own God. He is responsible to His own God, hence the idea of original sin. This primitive concept is different from Chinese culture, which is based on the relationship between people and people. The two have developed for good and bad, and we are not going to discuss the good or bad problems now, but to discuss the phenomena that have developed.
There are many such phenomena, for example, the clearest one, which is directly related to the fact that I moved back, is the attitude towards the elderly. There's a big difference here. In the West or in the United States, I think it is wrong to say that parents are not taken care of. But the Attitude of the West towards the elderly, especially the Attitude of the United States towards the Elderly, is indeed completely different from the entire Chinese society. Of course, this Chinese tradition is not necessarily all merit. For example, I have repeatedly said that there is a tendency in schools to be very senior, and there is not enough attention paid to young people and new ideas in schools.
I am almost 82 years old this year, and everything is fine after returning home, mentally and physically. My brother sent me an email the other day and he said your coming back is not a good measure, it's a perfect measure. The school took very good care of me, which is different from in the United States. When I was 60 years old, I met a man named Wolfenstein, a well-known physicist who was a classmate of mine. I told him: I just had a big discovery, a very important discovery. He thought I had some new theory of physics, and he said, "Tell me about it." I said, "Life is limited."
Yang Jianye's Biography of Yang Zhenning
When I was 80 years old, I said "life is limited", and the meaning of "life is limited" is different from that when I was 60 years old, I said "life is limited". You may not fully understand what I mean by the time you are 80 years old. I used to look at some of Wu Changshuo's paintings, Qi Baishi's paintings, which read "Shi Nian 75", or "Shi Nian 81", and at that time I thought this was a tradition of Chinese painters, but now I understand, not only that, there are very complicated meanings here. The first is that I am glad that I have lived to be 81 years old, that I have lived to be 75 years old; the second is that I can still draw, and I can still write this sentence, which means that I have many years to paint. All in all, I want to talk about the state of mind of the elderly and yours is very different. An old man, for the limited life of this thing, is consciously or unconsciously, at any time to know. So, I'm coming back now, in a sense, trying to go beyond that limit. I hope that in my lifetime, I can help Tsinghua University to build a good center for higher learning and train a group of young people. I'm trying to go beyond the limit of what the human world is limited.
(This article was reviewed and revised by Mr. Yang Zhenning)
[Originally published in Journal of Tsinghua University (Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition), No. 4, 2004, by Yang Zhenning, Center for Advanced Study, Tsinghua University]