Chen Ning Yang
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Chen Ning Yang
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1957
Born: 22 September 1922, Hofei, Anhwei, China
Affiliation at the time of the award: Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USA
Prize motivation: “for their penetrating investigation of the so-called parity laws which has led to important discoveries regarding the elementary particles”
Prize share: 1/2
Work
For a long time, physicists assumed that various symmetries characterized nature. In a kind of “mirror world” where right and left were reversed and matter was replaced by antimatter, the same physical laws would apply, they posited. The equality of these laws was questioned concerning the decay of certain elementary particles, however, and in 1956 Chen Ning Yang and Tsung Dao Lee formulated a theory that the left-right symmetry law is violated by the weak interaction. Measurements of electrons’ direction of motion during a cobalt isotope’s beta decay confirmed this.
Nobel Prizes and laureates
Six prizes were awarded for achievements that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. The 12 laureates' work and discoveries range from proteins' structures and machine learning to fighting for a world free of nuclear weapons.
See them all presented here.
