The Logos Scripture · The Book of Yang Chen-Ning

On the Thing Everyone Believed and No One Had Checked

The Book of Yang Chen-Ning 1 · Written by himself, from the paper of 1956, the commentary on his own work of 1983, and his writings on beauty

Yang Chen-Ning, born at Hefei in Anhui in China in 1922, died at Beijing in 2025, aged 103. Physicist. His father taught mathematics at Tsinghua and he grew up on that campus. In 1956, with Lee Tsung-Dao, he wrote a paper titled Question of Parity Conservation in Weak Interactions, showing that the law had never been tested for the weak force and setting out experiments that would test it; the next year Wu Chien-Shiung and others carried one out, and it was confirmed. In 1957 the two of them took the Nobel in physics together, the first Chinese to receive it — what chapter one describes is work the two did together, and the Order does not assign it to one of them. In 1954, with Mills, he wrote the paper that begins what is now called gauge field theory; there was a point in it that did not work, which the two stated plainly and published anyway, and twenty years later it became the frame of particle physics. In 1975, with Wu Tai Tsun, he drew up a table setting the physicists names against the mathematicians one for one. This volume rests on what he wrote or delivered himself: the paper of 1956; the long commentary he wrote in 1983 on his own earlier work, in which he sets down what he had thought and where he had been wrong (chapter two is taken from it); and his writings on beauty and physics. On God: he said that if what you ask after is a god in the shape of a man, he thinks there is none; that if you ask whether there is a maker, he thinks there is, because the structure of the whole world is not accidental. He also said that if the name carries no human shape in it, everyone can accept it, and he stated of himself that in his youth he had firmly opposed giving the maker or nature a human figure, and that as he aged his force of opposition weakened. The Order records this as he put it and does not tidy it for him. What matters is this: the word in his mouth is a name for the structure, not a step in an argument. No argument of his closes on divine will. What this volume brings is something the scripture did not have: beauty. There are books here that say to study for beauty (cf. The Book of Marie Curie 3.11) and that understanding takes nothing from beauty (cf. The Book of Feynman 2); none has asked whether beauty, which so often leads right, counts as a warrant. He stood on both sides of that question: once beauty deceived a whole generation, and once it carried him right when he could give no reason, and both times he could not tell which. He gave no answer, and the Order does not supply one for him. The last verse of chapter four is all he had.

1.1In 1956 there was a thing we could not get past.

1.2There were two objects with the same weight, the same length of life, the same in every particular; only when they came apart, one came apart in a left-handed way and the other in a right-handed way.

1.3If they were one object, then a law everybody believed would have to be moved. If they were two, why was every particular the same?

1.4The two of us talked it over a long while, and then did a very dull thing: we went through the old papers.

1.5We wanted to see who had established that law, and when, and by what means.

1.6It took some weeks. What we found was this: for two of the forces the law had been checked, and checked firmly.

1.7For the third force nobody had ever checked it. Not once.

1.8It was not that it had been checked and could not be settled. Nobody had gone and looked.

1.9By then the law had stood in the books for thirty years.

1.10Students learned it from the books, working men used it in their sums, and not one had turned round and asked what it rested on here.

1.11It had been carried over from elsewhere. When it was carried over everyone found it obvious, and so nobody wrote down the words: not verified here.

1.12Let me stop and say one thing, which will outlast the matter itself.

1.13A rule verified in one place and carried to another for use is borrowed. What is borrowed must be repaid, and one must first ask whether it may be borrowed at all.

1.14How many such notes a man signs in a lifetime, he does not himself know.

1.15The title of our paper had the word question in it. We did not say the law was wrong.

1.16What we said was: this has never been checked, and it can be checked in this way, and in this.

1.17Afterwards Wu Chien-Shiung did the experiment. It was extremely hard, cold to almost no heat at all. The result was that the law does not hold there.

1.18Let me set it down plainly: that was not our doing. We only pointed at where the hole was. Pointing at a hole and filling it are two things.

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