Chen Ningyang, one of the world’s most famous physicists and Nobel Prize winner, died on Saturday in Beijing at the age of 103 after a battle with illness, China’s official Xinhua news agency reported.
Born in Hefei, Anhui Province, eastern China, in 1922, Yang was a Chinese-American physicist who worked on statistical mechanics and symmetry principles in elementary particle physics.
Yang shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 with Tsung Dao Lee, who died in 2024.
They received the award for their work that overturned widely accepted “laws of parity” – which say that the forces acting on fundamental subatomic particles are the same left and right. In the popular description, they overthrew the concept of “mirror symmetry.”
Before Li and Yang questioned this basic principle, it was believed that the mirror image of any process displays a series of events that could equally well occur in the real world. In fact, there is no way to know whether you are watching a real event or its mirror image.
Yang grew up on the campus of Tsinghua University, outside Beijing, where his father was a mathematics professor, according to biographical details on the Nobel Prize website.
After completing his undergraduate and Master of Science studies at Chinese universities, he moved to the United States at the end of World War II for a fellowship at the University of Chicago.
There, he fell under the influence of Professor Enrico Fermi, the Italian W Naturalized American physicist best known as the inventor of the world’s first artificial body nuclear reactor.
From 1949, Yang joined the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he became a professor in 1955.
With Reuters