C. N. Yang: Stony Brook Masters Series

a theoretical physicist seon-young was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 among a host of other contributions to his field his work with Robert Mills resulted in yang-mills theory considered the basis of modern physics his crossed paths with the other great minds in his field Einstein and Fermi Oppenheimer and Teller here at Stony Brook the institute for theoretical physics which he directed for 33 years now bears his name dr. young thanks very much for taking the time I'm very happy to be here you grew up in China the son of a mathematics professor yes can you tell us a little about your early life I was born in central China but I grew up in Beijing so my primary school years and four years of high school or in Beijing and in 1937 I was 15 years old the sino-japanese war started and my family moved to southwestern China to a city called the cumin which is famous as the end of the Burma Road and I went to college there in 1945 I was 23 I won a scholarship to come to the United States so I came arriving on November the 24th in New York City because at that time there were no commercial traffic between China and the US and the only way for me to come from Kumon in southwestern China to the US was to fly to Calcutta India and there wait for a boat a ship one of those troop transport ships of the American military forces which we used to transport over a million American soldiers in the China Burma India theater from that area to the United States so I waited for two months in Calcutta for a berth on one of those troop transports and the ship was about 5,000 tons and we went through the Mediterranean and that Atlantic Ocean where we got into a storm and I remembered I was vomiting so much and I said to myself maybe this trip is not worth it but anyway I arrived in New York and went to Chicago and became a graduate student at the University of Chicago that was quite a quite an adventure for a young man yes it was and now of course to come to the United States from a completely different culture was I wouldn't say it was a shock but it was it required some adjustment was it you were your knowledge of physics that got you that sort of bridge that that divide yes I had a very good education both in college incoming and later for two years in the same University as a graduate student earning a master's degree my level of education in China was a very advanced such things like quantum mechanics I've studied the thoroughly in China so when I got to the University of Chicago which was which had at that time the world's best physics department I found that the quantum mechanics course offered in in Chicago was not as deep we don't know nor as detailed as the course I had in China so I had a head start in some sense and so I only PhD degree in Chicago and 1948 I was thinking that when you made your journey to the United States it was at about that time that the United States had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki yes how did that how did that affect you if at all in your identify children as a person oh it has a profound effect you know China was fighting the Japanese invasion from thirty seven to forty five eight years and China was very weak at that time and it was a miserable time and the Japanese were very brutal you may have heard of this massacre in Nanjing yes so and nobody had any inkling that there was this new weapon developed in the United States in fact I understand most of the people in the US didn't know about it they either right and so the morning in August when the bomb was dropped when the radio announced the news it was a great elation for the people in China because everybody knew that's the end of the misery of the eight years of war I remembered I was I came out of our house rented house and got onto the street and the sudden I saw many people exploding firecrackers you know in the Chinese to cause the celebration you have something to celebrate there you you have hundreds of firecrackers and then I got hold of a newspaper and then realized what happened of course that was a great event for the American people but I would say the American people did not suffer as much during the war as the Chinese people as a consequence of that the happiness and the elation that was felt in China was proportionally higher did you understand the physics ramifications of the atomic bomb at that time the general physics principle that the one can generate tremendous amounts of energy by Neutron collisions was known since 38 and 39 and that in fact even got into textbooks but the detailed procedure by which you can do that was a very complicated engineering process and you probably know that it was so difficult that the Germans in about 1940 443 decided it cannot be done during that war so they abandoned that project fortunately they did and they in the United States it was picked up first because of a letter Orange the road to President Roosevelt but more because of the fear among the American government and the physicists especially that the Germans might get it first so they devoted the wholehearted effort at Los Alamos to do this it's most important the event of course not only for the 20th century it's one of the great de Vence in the history of mankind you I and I certainly don't wish to make this all about the bomb but it's it's a sort of coincidental that you went to Chicago the University where much of this work was done and one of your mentors there with Fermi I believe yes tell me a little about Fermi and rico family was born in two-in-one 1901 in italy at that time italian physics was not so great and he was a precocious young man and he alone lifted it held the level of italian physics to world standards at a very young age he was a remarkable person i had said that the famiiy was a person with both feet on the ground how so in the sense that he was very solid he looks like he was a solid person and he is when he speculates on something you know that it was based already on concrete thought which he had already been thinking about therefore his words carry Authority because you know that these are not the random or of the top of one's hats a kind of remark and he was a great theorist as well as well as a great to make experimentalist you know in early centuries many great physicists were both theoretical and experimental but by the 20th century theoretical physics has gotten so complicated experimental physics has gotten so complicated so very few people could do both and Enrico Fermi was the last great physicist who contributed first-class work to both sides how was your relationship with him oh very close you see when I got to Chicago very rapidly everybody found that this young man from China was extremely well trained so I had they're very close at warm relationship with the fermi mrs. Fermi the Fermi's had two kids and one of them the older one nella was college age so the firm is always hold a square dance party in their house and I was there many times and got to know the family very well later on in 1949 Fermi and I wrote a paper together it's called our mess on elementary particles and I was very happy to see that that paper is still referred to today because we were the first to publish a paper saying that what is known as a pile maybe a bound state of a nucleon with an anti-nuclear these are probably two technical terms but anyway we wrote a paper together and so I was the one of the favorite students of family in Chicago you of course knew Oppenheimer here at the Institute for Advanced Study with Oppenheimer yes tell me about your relationship with him everybody knows that the opah hammer became very famous because of his direction of the atomic bomb project that during the war and in 1957 a 47 he accepted the directorship of the Institute for Advanced Studies and in 1949 he came to Chicago to give a talk about a new development in physics called the renormalization I will not explain what it is but anyway that was the hottest topic error around that time so I was fascinated by his talk and I knew that the start in that for the 4th 1949 there will be many experts on renormalization at his Institute in Princeton so I applied to become a postdoc at the Princeton and Omaha were accepted knee so started in 49 the 4 I went to the Institute for Advanced Studies I was originally just going to be there for one year as a postdoc and returned to Chicago but I remained and altogether I was in Princeton for 70 years from 1949 to 1966 and as you know the Institute for Advanced Studies was a well known ivory tower in the best sense of the world their scholars do their research without being bothered by a committee work without being bothered by graduate students and indeed I took great advantage of that that was the period that 17 years was the period where I did my best research work I understood that Oppenheimer tried to convince you to replace him when he left the Institute but that instead you came here to Stony Brook which was barely barely peeking out of the ground at the time what happened there yes what happened was the following in 1965 first before President Kennedy was assassinated he named the Oppenheimer as the next Enrico Fermi Prize winner the Enrico Fermi price was a presidential award it was originally awarded to fear me because Fermi was dying and they quickly created this price and gave it to him before he died in 1954 and afterwards many distinguished people who contributed to the u.s. wartime scientific work got the price including beta Android in teller etc and probably were very likely because President Kennedy wanted to erase the sorrows that the u.s. meted out to Oppenheimer in the Omaha my hearings of 1954 so he decided to give it give the next one in 62 to Omaha mer but before that transpired he was assassinated Kennedy was assassinated so then Johnson became president and in fact the rumors were that many of the people who are against the Oppenheimer tried to convince Johnson not to give that the world but the Johnson did not listen to them so there was a ceremony and the op hammer did win the war so that was a I think it was 1963 or 64 but in a way that was at that time so by 1965 Muhammad just had this great event of the United States ermand essentially saying implicitly we are sorry and we apologize now our hammers at the power act of the Institute had great difficulties with the mathematicians in the Institute that's a long story or not bother you with the details he was a director but the mathematics group which is the strongest at the Institute at that time and still today were unhappy with him in my opinion they were wrong in accusing our hammer of not favoring mathematics but anyway they made Oppenheimer's life very difficult for many years so one day in 65 I remember our hammer dropped by my office and said Frank I'm thinking of retiring as the writer how they think about it I was surprised but I thought about it for a few minutes and I said I think this is a good decision because I said you have been at the Institute for a long time now this is the right moment because a there is a law in the opposition on the part of the mathematicians against you and in the heat of great debate it's difficult for you to say I want to retire and secondly the United States government has essentially apologized to you this is the right moment so he thanked me for my opinion then he said I want to propose you as my successor my instinctive reaction immediately was that I don't want to to do it because I'm not a administrative type it's so I told him I'm honored that you thought so but the or think about it for a few men for a few days so I thought about it and eventually wrote him a letter saying that the I am not sure or be a good director I'm however very sure that I won't enjoy the life of being a director so that's the end of that part of the story but just around the time a little bit the before my final decision but after he had mentioned his proposal to me John Hall who had just become who had just been nominated as the president of suitable came to visit me and asked me to join him in stone a book to develop personal book into a great research university so when I wrote that letter to Alma hammer I had already decided with my family that I'm going to move to stone the book that was in 65 and you came on the pretty much on the promise that a great research institution would be built here because there was known at the time yes you of course know that stone work began v about 50 years ago but it was in another campus and the the real expansion started quite moved here and the great expansion started when John Tolkien in 65 and 66 and that was a great period of expansion and I think what you see today have all in many senses originated with the few beginning steps that the John Tour and his administration put in place and then you helped him with yes in some respects you knew also or Einstein yes I went to the Institute as I told you in 1949 he was 70 years old at that time and had just retired but I he lived close to the Institute and he would still walk to the Institute every day he didn't drive and he would walk to his office and then stay a few hours and then walk back now at that time our instance position in physics was powering it I had said repeatedly that the Newton and understand all the two greatest physicists of all times and but he was at that time no longer working on the things that we were we young people were interested in so we didn't so much bother him however I did hear two lectures by him and in 1951 I think I think it's 51 or 52 he sent his assistant Borya Kaufman to me and said you just published a paper in the Physical Review about the gas liquid how gas became a liquid how upon cooling and professor Einstein would like to talk with you about the paper Wow so I went to see him and we must have spent an hour and a half together and I was very much awed by his presence I didn't get very much out of that conversation all I remembered he repeatedly drew a curve which was very famous due to Maxwell a great physicist of the 19th century and indeed our instance understand was deeply in the tradition of old physics of classical physics two branches of that statistical physics and electrodynamics were his great fault and using this tradition using his deep perception in these two areas he launched the two and half revolutions for physics in the 20th century two and a half yes which was to have quantum mechanics the three revolutions were that's generally accepted as the greatest revolution in physics after Newton it was a special relativity general relativity and quantum mechanics special and general relativity were invented by him essentially along quantum mechanics was the work of many people and so I counted us half a revolution by origin and I'm unable to plumb the depths of physics or scale the heights of physics whichever it is but I wonder if you could explain to us non physicists the yang-mills theory ah you know what the fundamental physics is about is to ask how matter is put together in the 19th century finally people realized that everything is made of atoms and molecules in the 20th century we learned that the molecules are made of atoms atoms are made of protons and electrons and the neutrons but what are protons and neutrons made of now we know they are made of quarks so that is one aspect of what we do namely we want to take matter apart and look at the constituents but there's another part of the endeavor and then how these parts are put together the reason that they are together is because there's a force between them force is in daily language in physics we call it the interaction so the question is what are the interaction between these constituents interactional force it's we're known already since Newton's time there's gravitational force and through the 19th century we know they are electric and magnetic forces in the 20th century we know there are two additional kinds of forces they are called nuclear forces which are responsible for the atomic bomb nuclear force a nuclear force and the weak forces which are responsible for such things like radioactivity so there are now four types of forces the question is what are the precise nature of these four types we know that the gravity through Newton is a Heuer square law you've probably learned that in high school six so you might say that the basic question that the one of the basic questions one of the fundamental basic questions we face is how are these three other forces structured they are not inverse square laws but what are they and that's where the young Mears theory or gauge theory comes in a gauge Theory gives a principle which governed how these forces are structured mathematically precisely and who a nurse well originally in 1918 and 1919 stimulated by understand Herman vile a great mathematician proposed what is called gauge theory he used that to describe electricity and magnetism and that was successful but it does not apply to the other two the nuclear forces and weak forces and what Mears and I did was we generalized what the viol did and that becomes a general principle of forces of why they are these forces including gravity and that principle is now called the gauge principle and the gauge principles detailed mathematical structure is what we wrote down in 1954 at the time that we wrote it down nobody believed that was it was important and we didn't know it was that important but we said that this is a beautiful idea and the mathematical structure is very elegant so we published a paper about it and then 20 years later various experiments showed that that in fact was approximately the right direction then after struggling for another five years it became clear that it's not just the approximately right it is exactly right so that became something which is now the universally accepted principle of how these forces are formed 1954 yes how do you feel about that the fact that 50 years later something that you created that you propounded has been so so fundamentally or as so fundamentally changed your field well of course I feel good about it but I tell my students that the structure of everything oftentimes has hidden beauty in it if you can sense vaguely some of these beauty do not let go the reason that the in 1954 Mears and I were able to do it as I told you it was nothing agreement with experiment and nobody believed us but we saw the beauty of the structure so we wrote it down the elegance in structure that's right it's a it's a oh by the way I should add the following and that has something to do with Stone book ok the yummiest theory was published and gradually originally people didn't believe it gradually more and more people see the beauty of it so people began to work on it but it was only in the 70s that it was confirmed by experiment and so by the 60s they were not many papers but I would say every year there be ten papers 20 papers about it and I came to Starnberg in 1966 and one day it must be 68 or 69 was given a talk I was giving a lecture no I was giving a course on general relativity is a graduate course and I wrote down on the blackboard a long long formula a famous formula called the Riemann tensor Riemann was warm of the greatest mathematician of the 19th century and the Riemann tensor has something to do with the our instance gravity theory so I copied them from the blackboard to stay this long P long formula of the Riemann tensor as I was copying down it certainly flashed through my mind that the structure of this Riemann equation is very similar to the equation that Mears and I had written down when we wrote it down in 1954 we didn't notice we were not doing general relativity so we didn't notice there was any similarity but that like during that lecture I found that they were very similar so after the class I went to my office and checked indeed here and sure enough they were not just similar they were exactly the same if you define some quantities correctly so I was a bit excited but I didn't understand it and so I went to see Jim Simons Jim Simon's as you know was the young department chairman of mathematics at stole the book and he was a great geometry so he knew Ramon in geometry very well so I went to his office we were is doing that the old red brick building a bowtie his office and mine so I said Jim here is the Ramon name formula that you are very quickly very familiar with and some years ago Mills and I wrote this formula look they are very similar and he about the fire he said that yes yes that's not strange there are both fiber bundles so I said what's a fiber bundle so he gave me a book written by a famous Princeton mathematician called the sting rod it's called fiber bundles so I went back with book and but the book was impossible for me to understand the mathematicians have a tendency to write very dry very abrupt statements they are precise but there is no flesh to it so it's very difficult to his opens and this is it's impossible to understand so I didn't understand so I went back to Jim and said look this book is useless for physicists but we want to understand what the survival but the business is about and could you explain to me what it is he said the fiber bundles is a new thing in mathematics - but earlier that your physics in starting in the 40s there were already many papers in mathematics in fiber bundles and is now a important branch of geometry and so I said the could you give us some lectures understandable to theoretical physicists he said yes so he gave a series of luncheon lectures very informal there may be ten of us faculty and graduate students of the Institute of theoretical physics here at Stony Brook and as he must have talked for about a whole month and that was very useful for us so at the end of that we decided to give him a gift for this series of lectures so we chipped money together and decided to buy something for him and I went to Herman craw a mathematician whom I knew very well I said Owen we want to give Jim a gift what should we buy he said Jim cannot spell give him a dictionary so we bought a big dictionary and gave it to Jim and he told me recently that is they're using it but what we learned from Jim in those lectures were very important not only for me not only for stone book but in fact it launched a new trend and that came about this way after I understood the gist of what the mathematicians were doing with fiber bundles I realized indeed both general relativity of Einstein and gauge Theory were fiber bundles so I wrote a paper with TTU of Harvard immediately after that in which we we explained indeed here the relationship between the mathematicians ideas and terminology and the physics ideas and terminology and so we made a little dictionary the little dictionary had only maybe 15 entries on the left side all the physicists terminology on the right side all the mathematicians terminology and there was an exact respondents so we called it a dictionary but there's one item which physicists used repeatedly its technical term is called source source actually was due to the idea of source was due to ampere you know the electric current three amperes five amperes yes that was named after the great French physicist nineteenth-century phase Empire and now in physics amperes idea of a source was a crucial concept so we have to have that in our dictionary on the physics part but on the mathematics part I went to ask Jim what do you call this he said we don't deal with this concept so we left at the blank so it's a dictionary with maybe 15 entries on one side 14 entries on the other side and nothing to correspond the source yes but then easy signal from MIT a distinguished mathematician came to visit I had known him so I gave him a copy of our preprint and he looked at it and there's this blank so he thought about it and decided that is a very interesting concept and they should deal with it that they somehow in their 20 or 30 years of dealing with the fiber bundles had never touched on this idea so he went to England immediately and he was a great collaborator of a perhaps the greatest mathematician today in Great Britain micro attea it's now sir my criteria at that time he was not a sir yet and so they looked at it and found that this concept that they never used but we dealt with since ampere was a most interesting that became now a new branch of mathematics so they wrote a paper and because of the prestige and the fame of a dear and single many young mathematicians all began to look into this and now it is a thriving branch of modern mathematics world I call it where there are many names in particular a student of Atia called tonnison did the Pioneer Niren working it so it's called the Thomasin theory but the the all those are related to that blank spot so in some sense you know in the first half of the 20th century physics and mathematics were divorced in early centuries physics and mathematics were in close collaboration but in the first half of the 20th century the mathematicians became one more abstract they in fact they were very happy that they in fact the one of them wrote a article saying that the greatest contribution the greatest achievement of 20th century mathematics was that it finally liberated a cell from the shackles of physics that was by a famous mathematician but with this fiber bundle business the mathematicians and the physicists are now coming together again so if you want to say how did that come in together come about I would say that it has something to do with me and Jim and that blank spot in that dictionary and the Winstone the book so we are very happy that the Jim continued to be interested in physics and math and you know now he's a billionaire and he just announced he would give her twenty five million dollars two thousand that's great yeah so you I mean you have this is just another way you have made connections in in your life not only connections that having to do with matter that also yeah interdisciplinary connections as well I moved back my former wife passed away in to 0:03 I moved back to Beijing when I was growing up in Beijing as I told you before my father was a professor at the Sigma University in Beijing one of the most prestigious universities in China and so I grew up on that 13 war campus in 19 in 2-0 Zulu after my former wife passed away I moved back to that campus and now I'm a professor of physics on that campus and the gym and the Marilyn came to visit us in two zero zero one that's before my I moved back I was a already visiting that campus very frequently and Jim came and I remembered what happened precisely half-days visit I came back and he came back and I visited him and in his office here in Setauket I said the what's your impression of China oh he said he was very happy with the visit he said that I figured the greatest problem in the world today is poverty and here I see 1.3 billion people pulling themselves out of poverty by their own bootstraps that's a great contribution not only to themselves but to the world so they deserve our help what do you need so I said we have many visitors in Beijing but the housing was lousy how about the helping us to have some visits housing so he gave him million dollars and now that the complex prices of they're cheap in China so that 1 billion dollars sorry 1 million dollars is suffice efficient to have a nice apartment spirit that is called chern-simons Hall because one of his great contributions to math and physics was a paper he wrote with turn I in the 1970s and he had Marilyn recently went to Beijing and opened at home so I think that the through the math physics connection there is now a STONER book simple connection to I wanted to ask you you mentioned that when you came to the University of Chicago from China you were you actually already knew some of the things that they were teaching at the time you were very well trained how do you how do you see the differences in education in the United States and in China today that's a very important question I've been reflecting on that I think there are very fundamental differences and these fundamental differences show up on each side good points and bad points you know that the the newspaper said that the President Bush just appointed a committee to study how to address the problem of mathematics education in the primary and secondary schools in the United States why because in many many high school student mathematics examinations International examinations with maybe 30 nations the u.s. always is near the bottom is the Asian countries the top so of course that gets the educators and the mathematicians worried here and that's why this appointment oh why why is it that the u.s. high school education in mathematics is not as good it's because the whole education of philosophy and system are different the kids here are are more treated as adults even though they were young in China if you have a eight year old child and say you should do homework and he or she would just go to do the homework here if you have eight or nine year old child and we say you should do homework he or she would say I don't want to do it why not it's uninteresting it's boring the concept that doing homework might be boring does not exist in China so if you ask a child to do it he would just do it it is a matter of discipline or something oh yes it's a discipline which is in the air so that the concept that that a child would only do something that he or she is interested it does not they exist so that that's the difference now the consequence of that is that the kids are well trained that they do lots of mathematics exercises okay so that means the Chinese system is good no because if you go to China they're all discussing this Chinese system is no good all the kids are trained too much eh they have no free time and they cannot develop other interests be they have the tendency to become robot like they don't think for themselves so they are discussing ad infinitum how to change that system to be more like the American system so after you have observed both these do you realize that is a very complicated thing it's in fact if President Bush asks me what this mathematics community can do I would tell him they won't be able to do anything because it's not the educational system it's the whole society it's the whole value judgment its whole idea of how you educate the philosophy behind education is different and so in fact I believe that all that one can do on each side is to make small changes so as to most of the kids here are not interested in mathematics I would say that's okay that there's no reason for so many kids to be interested in mathematics but the system must be such that for those who could be interested who could in fact be extremely interested you must provide the opportunity for them to get into it on the other hand in China I would say that don't train all these kids all the time and then it's to straight lighten up yes so the I think a comparison of the educational system the education of philosophy in the Orient and in the United States is a very interesting and very deep subject given all that you've said why would I why would a student in China come to Stony Brook to study Oh mostly because graduate school in the United States is the best in the world today we were talking about in the last few minutes about the primary and secondary source when come to graduate education the the us the best us graduate schools are absolutely the best in the world so I always say that if you have a bright child the best thing is for him to get a good high school education in China a college education in China and getting a good graduate education in the United States and I myself benefited exactly from that I had a very good college education in China where the professors are very devoted they are very responsible they lead you through difficult things go into great depth and the covering large areas that's why when I came to Chicago I had the tremendous advantage compared with my fellow American graduate students but on the other hand when I came to Chicago I learned how to explore the frontiers how to be creative in your thinking about the frontiers problems so I got the best of both words and I think that is I was fortunate and I would recommend that to any young person who especially is interested in the sciences I think this is a good note to turn it over to our audience and and find out if there are questions in the audience if you'd step up to the microphone if you have a question for dr. yang you mentioned earlier that as time went on experimental and theoretical physics grew apart because of growing complexities within each of them I'm curious how you yourself decided which which one to go into order to just sort of happen with the work you were doing experimental versus theoretical physics yes how did how they grew apart and how did you adapt to that how did he actually decide to go into theoretical things how did you why did you decide to go into the theoretical branch ah as I said experimenter and theoretical physics have both become so complex by the mid twentieth century it's almost impossible to be an expert in both both and as I said the Fermi was the last physicist who made first-rate contributions to both sides now I myself when I came to the United States I knew that I had a very good grounding in theory I also knew that I had the almost no knowledge in experimental physics so I said I must broaden my educational bases so I decided I should write an experimental thesis here and so I worked in fact at Chicago for some 18 or 20 month months in the laboratory of professor Allison Allison was making a at that time a large accelerator is about the size of this room is a 400 the kilovolt Cockrell Wharton circuit and so he had maybe five or six graduate students and I became one of them but quickly I learned that I'm no good at the experimental physics when things go wrong I do not know why they are wrong and I off also oftentimes turn the wrong knob and do some very bad things to various things so my fellow graduate students were all a little bit worried when I get close to any equipment but we were on good terms because I could solve theoretical problems for them very easily but anyway after 18 or 20 months of work I was very frustrated because Alison gave me a problem and the experiment I was doing on that problem was not going well and one day teller came I had the paying contact with teller in theory and tell us at the I understand your experiment is not doing what I said right he said why do you stick to experiment you had already written a paper a short paper in theory I can sponsor that as your thesis if you make it a little bit longer so I said thank you very much I have to think about this because it was not according to my plans for so long thinking about it for a few days I find that I went back to him and said I accept your suggestion and that was a very important thing in my life namely to learn what I am good for what I'm not good for any other questions I have a question because both of studio baroque and Ching hai universe to have equity and mercy in the world and as a professor I have taught all of the students in both universities and how Cody works how creo compared the students in both of university was in America and another is in China thank you comparing the the students in China at the college level with the students in America at the at the college level yes I mean undergraduate in undergraduate yeah yes how would you compare undergraduate he spoken that's a very important topic especially since I have some firsthand observation I thought twice installable freshman physics and I taught for one semester in two zero zero for freshman physics at Tsinghua University so I have a first-hand knowledge about the freshman students in physics here and in Beijing symboi of course is one of the most difficult to get into universities in China and so I found that the there are two differences the difference number one I said the students in changhua are almost all very well trained they did lots of exercises in high school so such things like analytic geometry or trigonometry as no problems for them here at least half of my students here will not we're trained in analytic geometry or trigonometry they know the definitions but they cannot manipulate because they didn't do enough exercise so the first difference is that the the highest training in China is much more rigorous than here the second difference is that the students in China in civil University were very mature and they're motivated they were they knew they have to work hard they sort of appreciate that what they want to do and they go full force at it for the Stonybrook students I would say at least half of them were still sort of wandering around without any specific aim in life this is and I've thought about this this is again a product of the difference of the two societies now you cannot say which one is necessarily better the Chinese system is better in training a lot of people who would mature who would get channeled into some wake of way of life which would make them a useful citizens but the American system is more free and so therefore the people's outlook on life on everything is is less restrictive and the the best of them are given enough opportunity so that they can prosper look at Bill Gates Bill Gates is able alone to create the trillions of dollars not for not only for his company for the whole world so that kind of innovative spirit of free spirit is the kind of things that the United States educational system and Society so good at fostering and that's a that's true over the world I think the Europeans the Japanese or marvel at the great success of the United States system which produced all these tremendous innovations and as a consequence wealth okay thank you questions um professor you said to sense the beauty is important in the scientific research I want to ask her whether you have any tricks to sense the beauty KSM said the importance of sensing the beauty or the elegance of in scientific work do you have any tricks that help you to to spot the beauty or the elegance the direct answer is certainly no I think for a young person it is a important and that the American system is good good for this to allow oneself to be interested in in quite a number of things and to perceive some things some areas some directions that he or she is particularly interested in and if a person at a young age could latch onto something that he or she is interested in and fully developed that that may be the way he or she would find the elegance the beauty the usefulness of some things it's a the Chinese system is not good for this the Chinese system has too much of a tendency to impose what the children what the school for the society want the young person to look at and the discouraged him or her to branch out the American system is better in this respect so it's a I think there are good aspects and bad aspects of each system when you choose a to discuss different directions of what do you want to push dr. Jung thank you very much

Channel: Stony Brook University

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Keywords: C. N. Yang, Stony Brook University, Nobel

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Length: 67min 54sec (4074 seconds)

Published: Thu May 21 2009