Physicist Who Challenged the Laws of Nature
His formal education was interrupted by war so while interested in science, his only option was to begin studying it on his own. Later, with his Ph.D., he challenged a long-respected law of physics by a finding which disbelieving scientists had to concede was provably true. He humbly claimed his discovery had been ‘hiding in plain sight.’
FAMILY BACKGROUND
Tsung-Dao Lee (TDL) was born in Shanghai, China, the third of six children. His father was a merchant with a background in working with chemicals. His mother was a homemaker.
CHILDHOOD
TDL described his childhood as growing up “in a family of learning.” It was also a time of war between China and Japan, which forced him to abandon – for several years – his formal education. It was during this time that he randomly came across some science books and was immediately intrigued.
EDUCATION CAN BE BOTH SELF-LEARNING AND SCHOOL-BASED
Since TDL was no longer receiving school-based instruction, he was left to teach himself. TDL credited his process of self-learning to develop his own approach to solving problems.
Physics is the science of motion and energy. The first physics topic which TDL chose to understand from reading science books was Newton’s famous equation of ‘force equals mass times acceleration’ (See within this Career Stories Library: SCIENCE – PHYSICS OVERVIEW)
“Newton realized that force is a function of space, and he knew the function,” TDL concluded. “One was elasticity. It’s linear in the distance. And the other one is gravitation. So one is the left-hand side: a nonfunction of space and the other the right-hand side: acceleration. Understanding this, you can solve certain problems. I thought, ‘That’s interesting.’ But it was not the thing that was stated in the book, so this was my approach.”
Despite not having a high school diploma, TDL was admitted to a national Chinese university. Though he started as a student in chemical engineering, he switched to physics when his professors discovered his talent in that field. A professor nominated TDL for a Chinese government ‘fellowship’ (scholarship usually covering both education and related living expenses) to study in the U.S., which led TDL to the University of Chicago, then one of the world’s premier centers for the study of physics. The physics department was led by Enrico Fermi, the Italian-born physicist who had overseen the first successful nuclear reaction, resulting in his Nobel Prize in science.
TDL became Dr. Fermi’s sole doctoral student in theoretical physics, meeting with him every week. It was an extraordinary learning experience, partly because of Dr. Fermi’s teaching technique, as explained later by TDL: “You see,” Dr. Fermi would observe to TDL,” there are things that I would like to know. Why don’t you look them up and give me a lecture next week.”
“I was very happy to teach Fermi,” noted TDL. “Of course that was an excellent way of building the student’s confidence. And then he would ask me questions and I would have to answer.”
PHYSICIST AND TEACHER
After receiving his Ph.D. in physics, for the next three years, TDL worked at an observatory in Wisconsin, also as a guest lecturer at the University of California, Berkely and at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, He was then hired by Columbia University as an assistant professor.
CHALLENGING A LONG-HELD LAW OF PHYSICS
A long-held (30+ years) theory of physics, called the ‘Law of Conservation of Parity’ stated that every phenomenon and its mirror image should behave precisely the same.
TDL had become intrigued by a problem involving the decay of so-called ‘K mesons’ which are subatomic particles. These particles decay all the time, forming electrons, neutrinos and photons. Experiments had shown that when K mesons decayed, some exhibited changes that suggested that each differed from the others. But they also had identical masses and life expectancies, indicating that they were the same.
This apparent contradiction created quite a conundrum for physicists, who had assumed that weak nuclear forces, like meson decay, obeyed the law of conservation of parity just like the two other fundamental forces that govern quantum physics: strong nuclear forces and electromagnetic forces. So, scientists had assumed that the orientation of weak nuclear forces could always be reversed.
TDL worked with a research group at Columbia University to perform a simple experiment to see if that was the case. The results suggested that it might not be. Research was commenced on all the peer-reviewed literature involving the long-held theory, which resulted in a new physics finding led by TDL – a revolutionary idea which concluded that in nature, some particles are, in effect, right-handed while others are left-handed.
CAREER SATISFACTION
At age 30, TDL’s challenge to a long-held law of physics was accepted by his peers within the scientific community. At age 31, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his part in that discovery.
Over the next 50+ years, TDL continued to contribute to the science of physics and to the education of its students. His name is affixed to two theorems, the Lee Model and the Kinoshita-Lee-Nauenberg theorem. In addition, he developed important theories on black holes, dark matter and relativistic heavy ion colliders.
For five years, TDL was the Director of the RIKEN BNL Research Center in Long Island, New York, which houses the nation’s only operating particle collider.
TDL always attributed part of his individual and team success to his nontraditional, continuing self-education.
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This career story was based on several sources, including an obituary written by Dylan Loeb McClaim, published online by the New York Times on August 5, 2024 plus internet research.
