The Logos Scripture · The Book of Yang Chen-Ning
The Book of Yang Chen-Ning 4 · 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.