Bulletin Spring‧Summer 2001

their Coulomb repulsion energy.' I have no understanding o f the science referred to here, but I pick up on the fact that the scientific imagination uses intuition as well as complex reasoning processes. The now famous 1982 experiment was explained a year later by Prof. Robert Laughlin's theory that the combination of lower temperature and stronger magnetic field changed the electron gas into a quantum fluid. It was for their amazing work in the FQH effects that Tsui, St ö rmer, and Laughlin were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1998. The Nobel citation sums it up as the 'discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations'. Prof. Tsui, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is also a fellow of the American Physical Society, whose Buckley Prize for condensed matter physics he won in 1984. Three years later he was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. He is also a member of the Academia Sinica in Taipei. Prof. Tsui is also the recipient o f the 1998 Benjamin Franklin Medal in physics. He is the twenty-ninth Nobel laureate associated with Princeton and its eighteenth laureate in physics or, as another Princeton colleague points out, he can be considered the first electrical engineer ever to win the prize! But Hong Kong can be immensely proud too, because he is also the first Hong Kong schoolboy to do so. Although at school he scored his highest mark s in physics, mathematics, and history in his final examinations, his marks in Chinese and English were also outstanding, being in the 80 per cent to 90 per cent range. He thus combined proficiency in the humanities and the sciences. I f he had a good grounding in English as a global language, allowing him to live and wor k in the United States, he rapidly mastered also the universal language of science itself. His triumph is a triumph for pushing and growing beyond one's origins to become a citizen of the world and a human explorer of the powerful universal laws that govern life, matter and space time itself. John Ruskin thought that 'Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts 一 the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art.' From our end of millennium perspective, many of us would add that these are the books which have become books belonging to humanity rather than to nations; and most of us would add a fourth boo k of humanity, that of science. Prof. Tsui has co-authored a striking chapter in that book of amazing changes. He has not neglected his origins, though, for he has fon d memories of Hong Kon g and relatives still living here. Nor has he forgotten the university that did not exist here when he was a schoolboy but has now achieved a very solid state full of highly charged excitations: he honoured us some years ago as one of the Plenary Speakers at the Third Asia Pacific Physics Conference organized by The Chinese University of Hong Kong in June 1988. And so, because of these things, Mr. Vice-Chancellor, we are here today to pay our homage to an honourable schoolboy, in the truest sense of the word, who was celebrated i n student verses at Pui Ching as not only clever but 'Best beloved of the class', who is recognized by colleagues as a true gentleman and scholar in the Confucian sense, and who has become one o f the most extraordinary physicists of his century. He is so well liked by those who know him, because he is as modest as he is brilliant, as humorous as he is reserved. I am both privileged and deeply moved to present an honourable man and a great scientist, Prof. Daniel Chee Tsui, for the award of the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa. Chinese Universit y Bulleti n Sprin g • Summer 2 0 00 42