talk722

Epilogue to Ted Hsieh’s I Am Just on The Blue side of Lonesome
Bob Chen

I read with interest on Ted’s recent talk , it dawns on me that Ted’s talk cannot be 100% fiction on three tear drops tavern… etc. The epilogue stems from what I know about C. N. Yang, the Nobel laureate for physics in’57, and his days at University of Chicago. His boyhood playmate Liu in Beijing who went on to Purdue (the famous football school) to study electrical engineering/physics and earned a Ph. D., went back to PRC in early ‘50’s on President Wilson to become the father of Chinese atomic bomb. The professor in Ted’s talk could be the sum of Yang and Liu; although none of them taught physics near Chicago. Another non-fact is that Yang did not marry three times, only twice. His first marriage to General Tu’s oldest daughter was very successful. After her death around ’00, he married for the second time a 28 year old divorcee, who worked in a golf club in Shenzhen at 82. She seems to be quite bossy. People in Singapore wanted to organize a conference for Yang’s 90th birthday finally decided to invite Yang alone due to her less than welcome interferences/inputs. Albeit the last part I heard from my cousin without any other source, I don’t think my cousin makes it up.

Apart from these gossips, let me enlighten the lighters with some not well-known accomplishments of Yang that makes him way ahead of his Nobel Prize winning work with T. D. Lee. The second

$ 1,000,000 prize given by Clay Mathematical Institute after Riemann’s Hypothesis is for Yang-Mills Theory and mass gap hypothesis. The former is the only remaining problem from Hilbert’s original 1900 list of 20 problems for the 20th century he posted in Paris. Briefly, Yang-Mills Theory is a quantum field theory that is the closest to GUT (i.e., grand unified theory). It combines Maxwell’s electro-magnetic, nuclear weak, nuclear strong, gravitational, QED (quantum electro-dynamics) QCD (quantum chromo-dynamics). Most of the results have been verified, and netted many physicists Nobel prizes throughout the years. Although the mathematical solutions for the equations are still in the future, its impact for modern physics went beyond Yang-Lee’s ’57 work.

As an aside, Kurt Gödel has written a short paper in ’46, and published in ’49 for Einstein’s 80th birthday on the solutions for the field equations of Einstein’s general relativity. He showed that the time in the space-time is cyclic, or past-present-future time goes in circles. It is possible past and future can meet in some space. Einstein brushed it off in saying that the math is correct but physically it’s proved wrong. Although they walked to work together many years before and after that. These days the most advanced physics are using string theory to explain all the hot topics. To go back 10 to 15 years, Calabi-Yau Theory was the leading string theory for 10-dimensional space-time. Yau is our schoolmate, a Field’s medal winner, and recently tarnished mathematician for pushing his students’ fill-in work on Poincare’s conjecture (the only one solved to date out of seven unsolved problems that Clay Mathematical Institute offered $ 1,000,000 prize money) too hard. Well too long an epilogue, time to quit.