Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1998

Prof Yang Chen Ning ， BSc, PhD ， DSc ， Nobel Laureate in Physics citation N o award in the modern world is more — esteemed than the Nobel Prize. The man we honour today won that prize some time ago: he was only 35. His colleagues know him as a man whose friendly humanity is as evident as his unshakeable duty towards the progress of science and society in China. Especially in his caring for the y o u ng and his insatiable intellectual curiosity we glimpse the essence of his life. This curiosity extends beyond science into aesthetics and the humanities. Robert Browning asked in these famous lines: Ah, did you onceseeShelley plain, And did hestop and speakto you And did hespeakto you again? At The Chinese University of Hong Kong, we have seen Yang Chen Ning plain. He has stopped and spoken to many of us in ways that we shall not easily forget. His name must be included among the most illustrious physicists in the entire history of physics: Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein, Dirac — and certainly Yang. I believe he is also that most elusive of beings, a great man. That we honour him today is as real a privilege as it is a fortunate duty. Prof. Yang's thinking displays what the novelist Tolstoy called the highest wisdom, '...the science of the whole — the science explaining the whole creation and man's place in it.' Yang's theoretical physics has played a major part in explaining the very foundations of the behaviour of all matter in away that resonates with Einstein's theme of a unified theory. Through his good will towards others and utter lack of pretention, he provides not precepts but aliving example of what Tolstoy envisioned, working tirelessly to inspire young people in the world of education and helping the peaceful progress of humanity by linking countries through science and education. He has inspired and helped the Zhongshan University Advanced Research Centre and another at Tsinghua in Beijing. Most recently he has been selected to head a committee of the SAR to advise on developing new technology. H ow d id Yang Chen N i ng manage to become one of the greatest physicists in our century of great physicists? There is no brief answer, except to stress his own genius and say that his route to fame is as surprising as modern physics itself. Born in Anhui, China, the student Yang revealed something of his potential at the National Southwestern Associated University in Kunming by obtaining his Bachelor of Science degree earlier than most, at the age of 20. His father was a professor in mathematics, so that home background was a decided advantage. Prof. Yang, the second generation of modern scientists in China, recalls his undergraduate university as first-rate, despite a class he took with a rather bad English professor! Looking back on his senior year in a small department, he recalls the advent of Huang Kun, a new graduate student w i t h wh om he forged a friendship that was to last 50 years, and their discussions of the then revolutionary quantum mechanics with Prof. Wu Ta-You. The following year, as a graduate student himself, Yang shared a small room and a job in a middle school with his fellow students, Huang Kun and Zhang Shou-lien. The background to their lives was war and the retreat of masses of civilians and troops to the hinterland. This sounds an even more unpromising route to the Nobel Prize than Einstein's Patents Office in neutral Switzerland. Yet this triumvirate of young scientists would drink tea after supper and talk for hours about everything that caught their attention, but above all about physics, their discussions and The 53rd Congregation 13