Talk:Yang Chen-Ning

Wu who?
The article Wu-Yang monopole said just "Wu and Yang"; no other names for them. I searched and found this book by Tai Tsun Wu and Chen Ning Yang. It's about monopoles, and it's the right era, so I went with it. Chen Ning Yang is a good link and looks like the right sort of person and the right timeline, but Tai Tsun Wu is a red link. I see that Chen Ning Yang collaborated with Chien-Shiung Wu. I am quite convinced now that Tai Tsun Wu is a Harvard professor and author of many physics books, and not the same person as Chien-Shiung Wu. I have established that Yang collaborated with two different Wus, and I don't know which Wu the Wu-Yang monopole is named for. — Randall Bart 19:03, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

The correct name is Zhen Ning Yang (following pin yin rules)

Chien-Shiung Wu（吴健雄），Tai Tsun Wu（吴大峻）. The "Wu" in Wu-Yang monopole is Tai Tsun Wu. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.196.143.25 (talk) 19:57, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Verifiable info
There are unsourced personal info in the article. For example, his relation with his collaborator Lee and his recent family life. These should be added as soon as possible. I'm already tempted to remove the information. --C S (Talk) 12:13, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Nationality
What is his nationality? Is he an American citizen or not? As far as I know, he has been an American citizen since 1964 -- did he renounce his citizenship? If not, why is he called "Chinese American?" Is "Chinese American" a nationality or an ethnic category? For nationality, he should be listed as either "Chinese" or "American" -- based on his country of citizenship. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.67.73.7 (talk) 01:29, 14 June 2007 (UTC) I changed the nationality to match (for example) T.S. Eliot: "Nationality: Born American, became a British subject in 1927." It makes no sense to invent nationalities that don't exist: Chinese-American is not a nationality. Just want to add that if he has dual citizenship, this should be reflected in the article, as well.


 * Chinese in this case refers to his race and not his nationality, cf Jewish American. 86.178.72.231 (talk) 14:47, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

The current page shows a "citizenship" field, and I added ROC (Republic of China) to this field, together with USA. When he received the Nobel prize, he was a ROC citizen, not an USA citizen. ROC nationality law does allow dual citizenship, I believe so does the US law. I don't believe he ever renounced his ROC citizenship (I　may be wrong), which requires certain legal procedures. JW19335762743 (talk) 17:07, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Birth date
Birth date of Yang is October 1, not September 22. See http://insti.physics.sunysb.edu/~yang/yangbio.pdf. Visor 16:25, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject class rating
This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 14:26, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Yang/Mills Vs. Pauli/Fierz on spin 1
The theory of the spin 1 relativistic field was certainly first developed by Pauli and Fierz, who wrote down all free field theories in the 30s. They also did spin 3/2, but spin 3/2 is nowadays credited to Rarita/Schwinger. The issue of priority in both cases is a little fraught. I looked at Yang/Mills paper, and they gave the geometrical bundle structure of the theory, arguing by direct analogy with general relativity, and I think that was the central new insight of Yang/Mills. Similarly, Rarita and Schwinger emphasized that a spin 3/2 field should be thought of as a vector of spinors, and this was the central insight there, absent in the general Pauli Fierz formalism. If you take Pauli/Fierz stuff at face value, they went through all the free field equations systematically, so they discovered everything--- including linearized GR. But it would be hard to extract Einstein's geometrical insights about GR from the spin 2 field, likewise, even after Rarita/Schwinger, the supersymmetry insights about spin 3/2 didn't come until the late seventies. So the appropriate question here is whether Pauli and Fierz understood the geometric content of spin-1 theories. I don't think they did, so the credit properly belongs with Yang and Mills.

Historically, I don't think that Pauli complained about priority--- I thought he only complained that Yang was hiding the (to Pauli obvious) fact that the new spin-1 Yang-Mills particles were going to be massless. In response to Pauli, Yang responded that nonlinear effects make it difficult to say that the particles would remain observable massless excitations, or if they would somehow acquire a mass by magic. I wonder if he actually anticipated confinement in this response, or if he was just trying to fudge things. If he was just fudging, I think this is the only case in history where the dishonest answer turned out to be the correct one.Likebox (talk) 00:17, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
 * interesting remarks, but I would never refer to Yang's counterargument as dishonest. Expedient maybe, based on Yang's awareness of the incomplete, if promising, character of his model. Moreover, according to current conventional wisdom, it's through the Higgs mechanism that W and Z bosons, as well as quarks and leptons via Yukawa coupling, become massive. In other words, it's the later introduction of the Higgs mechanism that made a modified Yang-Mills theory viable. Since the Higgs boson is nowhere in sight, I am not entirely sure that the theory will stay "correct" for long. 82.56.16.216 (talk) 09:40, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

emerge of gauge symmetry
The notion of gauge symmetry (scale symmetry) came from Weyl, he tried that first on Einstein theory but failed. Later, he tried a complex scale factor on QED and succeeded: from that time(1929) people realized there was a symmetry behind spin-1 theory, the U(1) gauge symmetry. Pauli should be quite impressed about Weyl’s idea and had thought about it in 1930 and 1940s or even 1950s. As he nearly didn’t publish his ideas it’s not clear if he had thought about nonAbelian generalization or he had been in other direction.

Besides reasons Likebox mentioned above, I think the credit was given to Y&M also because Y&M propose a physical principle: if the nature is ruled by new a gauge symmetry there should be a corresponding new force. So besides U(1) electromagnetism, there may be SU(2) (weak) force and SU(3) (strong) force…..They indeed introduced SU(2) theory to describe a new interaction, although isospin doublet is not realy weak force in their original context. I'm not sure if other people had expressed similiar idea before them.

And the most direct reason it’s called YM theory is of course Y&M was the first published a genuine nonAbelian gauge theory. Slam’s student Ronald Shaw also figured out nonAbelian structure in his thesis, but much less known. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 218.69.36.251 (talk) 03:18, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

Yang incident with Pauli
This article says "Yang could not answer Pauli's question". Yang said that the new gauge bosons are not necessarily massless becuase there are complicated interactions. Pauli thought this was not true, that the bosons would be massless. So technically speaking, Yang did not answer--- he said "This is too complicated to answer". Pauli thought the answer was obvious--- zero mass bosons.

But the answer is known today, and as it turns out, Pauli was wrong, and Yang was right. There are no massless particles in yang-mills theory, because of the complicated interactions. There's confinement instead. I don't know if Yang had a hunch about something like this back then, I can't imagine how he would, but maybe he suspected something like this. Or maybe he thought there would be a mass-generation mechanism, along the lines of Stuckelberg electrodynamics. He's around--- somebody could ask him what he meant. But anyway, it is a gross mischaracterization to say that Yang took it from Pauli--- it's just not true. As for Klein, he was probably thinking of it as a classical field theory, which is a whole different ballgame. So I'll erase the new stuff.Likebox (talk) 22:46, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Klein's work in the 1930s cannot be called SU(2) "Yang-Mills" theory as Klein didn't consider non Abelian invariance, although he assembled fields to a 2x2 matrix. See the technical explaination(page 8 to 16): http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9411233 On the other hand Pauli indeed deserves credit: he generalized Klein's work to compactify 6 dimension gravity on S2 to get vector fields--so called non Abelian Kaluza-Klein theory, formally he had got some basic ingredients of non Abelian theory(gauge transformation,field strength...) around 1953. See http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc?papernum=0012054 Pauli communicated with Pais on his ideas, he was bothered by the massless gauge bosons. In fact, around the year 1954 several people were working on this topic: Pauli, Y&M, Shaw, Utiyama, they all shoud be credited, in some sense. So the situation seems more complex. Some people informally term non Abelian theory as "Yang-Mills-Pauli-Shaw"....Oops. A technical review of these simultaneous developments is L O'Raifeartaigh's book "The Dawning of Gauge Theory", and a short article http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9810524

220.241.199.81: Can you tell us where you read the "anecdote" of "In 1956(4?), prior to Yang's presentation, W. Pauli .......Several weeks later, when Yang presented the same theory at Princeton....."? As I have no more materials in my hand(Pais's recollection?) I don't find a record that Pauli made his non Abelian Kaluza-Klein theory widely publicized, and is there any credible evidence that Yang had got clue from Pauli's work? Or it's your own derivation?218.69.36.145 (talk) 21:46, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

"Proved theoretically"?
What is meant in the lead by "proved theoretically"? Rt3368 (talk) 06:47, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

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Centenarian
Perhaps this should be included? 146.200.180.251 (talk) 23:08, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

Name order in article names
Perhaps Wikipedia should have a consistent policy for the order of Chinese names in article names, at least for articles about scientists. This article is Yang Chen-Ning which is Chinese name order (family name first). However his collaborator's article is Tsung-Dao Lee which is Western name order (family name last), and so is their experimental colleague whose article is Chien-Shiung Wu (Western order). Perhaps all 3 articles should follow the Nobel site (and most of the physics literature?) which uses Western order for both Lee and Yang. Although it is true that political articles follow the newspapers and use Chinese name order, as in Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping. Dirac66 (talk) 03:48, 1 December 2022 (UTC)