Tsung-Dao Lee The Nobel Prize in Physics 1957

biography

Upton, NY – Nobel laureate Tsung-Dao Lee, a physics professor at Columbia University and Director Emeritus of the RIKEN-BNL Research Center at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, has been named a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by Pope John Paul II. The Pope will give Lee the insignia of his appointment at the academy’s headquarters in Rome on November 7, as part of the ceremonies to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the founding of the academy. Consisting of 80 members, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences promotes the progress of the mathematical, physical and natural sciences as they relate to epistemological problems. Members in the academy are chosen on the basis of “their eminent original scientific studies and their acknowledged moral personality, without any ethnic or religious discrimination, and are nominated for life by sovereign act of the Holy Father.”

“I am not religious, but I am happy to be elected to the Pontifical Academy,” Lee said. “While religion is based on faith and science is based on rational thinking, it is gratifying to be assured that scientists and people of faith are not disassociated from each other. I believe that today’s scientific discoveries may be able to help the world. But in order to make our world a better one, we need our convictions. Science alone is not sufficient.” Lee has met Pope John Paul II on several occasions before. The last time was in 1992, when the Pope acknowledged publicly that the Roman Catholic Church had wronged Galilei Galileo, one of the first members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, for denouncing the famous scientist because he espoused the Copernican theory of the solar system in 1611. During that time, the Roman Catholic Church took the prevailing view that the Earth, not the sun, was the center of the solar system. Lee has devoted his long career to the study of the theoretical aspects of particle and nuclear physics. In 1957, Lee and Chen Ning Yang won the Nobel Prize in physics for disproving a tenet of physics known as the conservation of parity. Their finding was based on research carried out at Brookhaven’s particle accelerator, the Cosmotron, while they were visiting scientists at the Laboratory in 1956.

In 1997, forty years after receiving the Nobel Prize, Lee returned to Brookhaven Lab as Director of the RIKEN BNL Research Center. Japan’s Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) and Brookhaven formed the collaboration to work on basic questions in physics. In addition to developing physics theory, the collaboration studies data produced by Brookhaven’s newest accelerator, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, to understand the properties of quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter that scientists theorize existed near the beginning of the Universe.

Born in Shanghai, China, Lee attended universities in China before coming to the U.S. in 1946, where he became a student of Enrico Fermi and received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1950. After working as a research associate at the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley, Lee joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1951. Then, in 1953, he joined Columbia University, where he is currently University Professor.

After serving a six-year term as Director of the RIKEN BNL Research Center, Lee stepped down as of October 1, becoming Director Emeritus. In addition, Lee is Director of the China Center of Advanced Science & Technology in Beijing; the Beijing Institute of Modern Physics; and the Zhejiang Institute of Modern Physics, all in China. He holds twelve honorary degrees and 15 honorary professorships and is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and several other academies.

Tsung-Dao Lee was born on November 24, 1926, in Shanghai, China, as the third of six children of Tsing Kong Lee, a business man, and Ming Chang Chang. He was educated at the Kiangsi Middle School in Kanchow, Kiangsi, from which he graduated in 1943. He did his matriculation at the National Chekiang University in Kweichow province. The Japanese invasion forced him to flee to Kunming, Yunnan; here he attended the National Southwest University where he met Chen Ning Yang, who in 1957 was to share the Nobel Prize with him. Being a most promising student in physics he was, in 1946, awarded a Chinese Government Scholarship, which took him to the University of Chicago, where he gained his Ph. D. degree in 1950 on his thesis Hydrogen Content of White Dwarf Stars. For some months in 1950 he served as research associate at Yerkes Astronomical Observatory, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

From 1950 to 1951 Dr. Lee was a research associate and lecturer at the University of California in Berkeley, and then accepted a fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton,

N. J. Here he was a member of the Institute's Staff, from 1951 to 1953, and had occasion to work jointly with his friend Dr. Yang. Lee was then fast becoming a widely known scientist, especially for his work in statistical mechanics and in nuclear and subnuclear physics, having solved some problems of long standing and of great complexity. Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer praised him as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists then known, whose work was characterized by "a remarkable freshness, versatility, and style". Apart from the subject of parity non-conservation-which earned him the Nobel Prize -and statistical mechanics and nuclear physics mentioned earlier, his investigations also comprised field theory, astrophysics, and turbulence.

Lee was in 1953 appointed Assistant Professor of Physics at Columbia University, and afterwards successively promoted to Associate Professor (1955) and Professor (1956). He was then, at the age of 29, the youngest professor in the Faculty; the next year, being recipient of the Nobel Award at barely 31 years of age, he became the second youngest scientist ever to receive this distinction. (The youngest was Sir Lawrence Bragg who shared the Physics Prize with his father in 1915, at the age of twenty-five.) Together with Dr. Yang, Lee wrote several prominent articles in The Physical Review. Among the honours bestowed on Professor Lee are: the Albert Einstein Commemorative Award in Science of Yeshiva University, New York (1957) and the Science Award of the Newspaper Guild of New York. He has also been elected Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Academia Sinica, and was awarded a D.Sc. degree by Princeton University (1958 ).

Lee married (Jeannette) Hui Chung Chin a former university student, in 1950. His favourite pastimes are: playing with his two young boys, James and Stephen; and reading "whodunits" (detective novels).