Chen-Ning Yang Quotes

The question was heatedly debated of how much Western culture should be brought into China.

— Chen-Ning Yang

“Nature seems to take advantage of the simple mathematical representations of the symmetry laws. When one pauses to consider the elegance and the beautiful perfection of the mathematical reasoning involved and contrast it with the complex and far-reaching physical consequences, a deep sense of respect for the power of the symmetry laws never fails to develop.”

— Chen-Ning Yang

“In the final analysis, the incident is seen as originating from an emotional expression of the frustration and anger of the proud people of China who had been subject to ever increasing oppression from without and decadent corruption from within.”

— Chen-Ning Yang

“I should like to say that I am as proud of my Chinese heritage and background as I am devoted to modern science, a part of human civilization of Western origin, to which I have dedicated and I shall continue to dedicate my work.”

— Chen-Ning Yang

I was later to receive an excellent first two years' graduate education in the same University and then again was able to pursue my studies in the U.S. on a fellowship from the aforementioned fund.

— Chen-Ning Yang

“In the latter half of the last century the impact of the expanding influence of Western culture and economic system brought about in China a severe conflict.”

— Chen-Ning Yang

“As I stand here today and tell you about these, I am heavy with an awareness of the fact that I am in more than one sense a product of both the Chinese and Western cultures, in harmony and in conflict.”

— Chen-Ning Yang

“A graduate student who is still learning courses is not really taking a maximum advantage of a research university's offerings. He should already be finished with course-taking, as he would then be able to shape his own taste about what is a good subject for research work in the graduate school.”

— Chen-Ning Yang

“The strongest interactions are the nuclear interactions, which include the forces that bind nuclei together and the interaction between the nuclei and the z mesons. It also includes the interactions that give rise to the observed strange-particle production.”

— Chen-Ning Yang

“Science has become something that everybody knows he has to pay attention to, but not everybody is a believer. So I don't think we should equate science with religion. But, that science is progressively playing a more and more important part in the life of every individual is obvious.”

— Chen-Ning Yang

“The application of group theory to physics became one of the main branches of physics that I specialized in.”

— Chen-Ning Yang

I think America is a new country. It is a young culture. The spirit of the opening of the West is still with the Americans. It's a very practical and individual-based kind of philosophy that had worked in America for a long time, had been very successful. And the spirit is very much there.

— Chen-Ning Yang

“I think in the sciences there is still the general belief that America is still tops. For America to lose that, I think, would be very bad, not just speaking as a scientist myself. I think it would be very bad for the morale of the whole country.”

— Chen-Ning Yang

Qinghua was first established as a preparatory school in 1911. In 1928, it became a university. In 1929, my father joined Qinghua as a professor, so that was also the year that I moved to that campus because my father brought the whole family along.

— Chen-Ning Yang

“The existence of symmetry laws is in full accordance with our daily experience. The simplest of these symmetries, the isotropy and homogeneity of space, are concepts that date back to the early history of human thought.”

— Chen-Ning Yang

“The law of right-left symmetry was used in classical physics but was not of any great practical importance there. One reason for this derives from the fact that right-left symmetry is a discrete symmetry, unlike rotational symmetry, which is continuous.”

— Chen-Ning Yang

“The three discrete invariances - reflection invariance, charge conjugation invariance, and time reversal invariance - are connected by an important theorem called the CPT theorem.”

— Chen-Ning Yang

“There's a real difference of what one believed was one's chief responsibility between American professors and Chinese professors. This was vividly revealed to me when I compared what I could learn in Chicago and what I could learn in China.”

— Chen-Ning Yang

“There are only two kinds of math books: Those you cannot read beyond the first sentence, and those you cannot read beyond the first page.”

— Chen-Ning Yang

“Einstein's theory of General Relativity has a mathematical structure very similar to Yang-Mills theory.”

— Chen-Ning Yang

“In 1975, ... [speaking with Shiing Shen Chern], I told him I had finally learned ... the beauty of fiber-bundle theory and the profound Chern-Weil theorem. I said I found it amazing that gauge fields are exactly connections on fiber bundles, which the mathematicians developed without reference to the physical world. I added, "this is both thrilling and puzzling, since you mathematicians dreamed up these concepts out of nowhere." He immediately protested: "No, no. These concepts were not dreamed up. They were natural and real."”

— Chen-Ning Yang