Yang Zhenning, a great all-around physicist. It's just that what we know about him is mostly limited to his marriage with Ms. Weng Fan. Further, we only know that he won the Nobel Prize, but we don't know what the Nobel Prize is. In a sense, this is our sorrow, but also the regret of popular science. Many of us are well aware of the gossip of a third-line and fourth-line star, but we know nothing about a person who has made great contributions to mankind all over the world.
It should be good to be a national academician. It is easy for Yang Zhenning and Lao Yang to become academicians of a country. In addition to China, the United States, the Russian Academy of Sciences, there are Britain, Brazil, Spain and other countries, and some weak countries are embarrassed to take out academicians. As for Lao Yang's other prizes, not to mention a Nobel Prize in physics, it is enough to explain everything.
The greatness of Yang Zhenning and Lao Yang lies in his 13 world-class contributions in four physical fields: statistical mechanics, condensed matter physics, particle physics and field theory. Actually, particle physics and field theory are the best. His theory-Young-Mills field is one of the cornerstones of the basic theory of physics. Just like Newton's mechanics and Einstein's theory of relativity, no matter how many years have passed, as long as human civilization still exists, we humans can't avoid his theory, so we must study and study it.
The greatness of Yang Zhenning and Lao Yang lies in that in recent decades, many physicists in the whole physics field have used the theories of Yang Zhenning and Lao Yang to keep the balance of payments. In recent decades, seven Nobel Prizes in Physics have been directly related to the theories of Yang Zhenning and Lao Yang. There are dozens of indirectly related ones. It can be said that Yang Zhenning and his disciples almost monopolized the theoretical physics and particle physics of the Nobel Prize in Physics in the past 60 years. In addition, there are six Fields Prizes for studying Yang Zhenning's equation.
Neither Yang Zhenning nor Lao Yang is famous at present. I think the main reason is that he studies the frontier of physics, which is too profound for most of us to understand. Just like Newton in those days, Newton's fame was gradually heard by later generations (later generations gradually understood the theory of mechanics). With the development of science, one day everyone will know Yang Zhenning and Lao Yang.