At 31, he and a colleague won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering that subatomic particles, contrary to what scientists thought, are not always symmetrical.
By Dylan Loeb McClain
Aug.5, 2024
Tsung-Dao Lee, a Chinese American physics who shared the Noble Prize in Physics in 1957 overturning what had been considered a fundamental law of nature —— that particles are always symmetrical —— died on Sunday at his home in San Francisco. He was 97.（华裔物理学家李政道于周日在旧金山的家中去世，他于1957年获得诺贝尔物理学奖，推翻了粒子总是对称的自然基本定律。终年97岁。）
His death was announced in a joint statement by the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute at the Jiao Tong University in Shanghai and the China Center for Advanced Science and Technology in Beijing. Dr. Lee was a longtime professor at Columbia University. （上海交通大学李政道研究所和北京中国先进科学技术中心在一份联合声明中宣布了他的死讯。李是哥伦比亚大学的资深教授。）
The theory that Dr. Lee overturned was called the law of conservation of parity, which said that every phenomenon and its mirror image should behave precisely the same. At the time he challenged the theory , in 1956, it had been widely accepted for 30 years.（李推翻的理论被称为宇称守恒定律，该定律认为每种现象及其镜像都应该表现得完全相同。1956年，当他挑战这一理论时，它已经被广泛接受了30年。）
Dr. Lee was a younger professor at Columbia, where he had been promoted to full professor at age 29 —— the youngest in the university’s history at that point.He 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.（李博士是哥伦比亚大学的一名年轻教授，29岁时被提升为正教授，是该校历史上最年轻的教授。他对一个涉及所谓的K介子衰变的问题很感兴趣，K介子是亚原子粒子。这些粒子一直在衰变，形成电子、中微子和光子。实验表明，当K介子衰变时，一些介子表现出的变化表明它们彼此不同。但它们也有相同的质量和预期寿命，表明它们是相同的。）
This apparent contradiction created quite a conundrum for physicists. They 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, which bind protons and neutrons together in the nucleus, and electromagnetic forces, which govern the attraction and repulsion of electric charges and the behavior of light. In other words, scientists had assumed that the orientation of weak nuclear forces could always be reversed.（这一明显的矛盾给物理学家带来了相当大的难题。他们假设弱核力，如介子衰变，遵守宇称守恒定律，就像控制量子物理学的另外两种基本力一样：强核力，将质子和中子在原子核中结合在一起，电磁力，控制电荷的吸引和排斥以及光的行为。换句话说，科学家们认为弱核力的方向总是可以颠倒的。）
Dr. Lee asked a research group at Columbia to perform a simple experiment to see if that was the case. The results suggested that it might not be.（李博士要求哥伦比亚大学的一个研究小组进行一个简单的实验看看情况是否如此。结果表明，事实可能并非如此。）
He called on Chen Ning Yang, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., whom Dr. Lee had worked with and had also known as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, and together they went back through all the studies and experiments involving weak forces.（他拜访了新泽西州普林斯顿高级研究所教授杨振宁，李曾与他共事，也曾是芝加哥大学的研究生，他们一起回顾了所有涉及弱力的研究和实验。）
Dr. Lee and Dr. Yang came to the conclusion that there was only one reasonable answer to the problem raised in K meson decay: Unlike strong nuclear forces and electromagnetic forces, weak nuclear forces did not obey the law of conservation of parity. It was a revolutionary idea because it meant that in nature, some particles are, in effect, right-handed while others are left-handed.（李和杨得出的结论是，对于K介子衰变中提出的问题，只有一个合理的答案：与强核力和电磁力不同，弱核力不遵守宇称守恒定律。这是一个革命性的想法，因为它意味着在自然界中，一些粒子实际上是右手的，而另一些粒子是左手的。）
In the fall of 1956, Dr. Lee and Dr. Yang published their theory in the journal Physical Review.（1956年秋天，李和杨在《物理评论》杂志上发表了他们的理论。）
A groundbreaking experiment by the physicist Chien-Shiung Wu involving the decay of cobalt atoms was performed later that year,confirming that Dr. Lee and Dr. Yang were right. They were awarded the Nobel Prize the following year.（当年晚些时候，物理学家吴健雄进行了一项涉及钴原子衰变的开创性实验，证实了李博士和杨博士是对的。次年，他们被授予诺贝尔奖。）
Dr. Lee was just 31 when he accepted the prize; he and Dr. Yang were the first Chinese-born laureates.（李获奖时只有31岁；他和杨是第一位在中国出生的获奖者。）
Dr. Lee had an exceptionally long and productive career. He retired from regular teaching at Columbia in 2012, at age 86, but continued to contribute ideas to particle physics research into his 90s. His name is affixed to two theorems, the Lee Model and the Kinoshita-Lee-Nauenberg theorem-and he developed important theories on black holes and dark matter.（李博士的职业生涯异常漫长且富有成效。2012年，86岁的他从哥伦比亚大学的常规教学中退休，但在90多岁时仍继续为粒子物理研究贡献思想。他的名字被附在两个定理上，李模型和木下李-诺恩伯格定理，他发展了关于黑洞和暗物质的重要理论。）
He was also a prominent physicist in the field of relativistic heavy ion colliders, and from 1997 to 2003 he was the director of the RIKEN BNL Research Center at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, which houses the nation’s only operating particle collider.（他也是相对论重离子对撞机领域的杰出物理学家，从1997年到2003年，他担任长岛布鲁克海文国家实验室RIKEN BNL研究中心主任，该中心是美国唯一运行的粒子对撞机所在地。）
In a 2007 interview with the Nobel Institute on the 50th anniversary of his Nobel Prize, Dr. Lee attributed part of his success, particularly his insight into parity nonconservation, to his nontraditional education.（在2007年诺贝尔奖50周年之际，李博士接受了诺贝尔研究所的采访，他将自己的成功，特别是他对平等非保守的见解，部分归功于他的非传统教育。）
Tsung-Dao Lee, who was often known as T.D., was born on Nov. 24,1926, in Shanghai, the third of six children of Tsing-Kong Lee, a merchant with a background in working with chemicals, and Ming-Chang Chang. Dr. Lee said he grew up “in a family of learning.”（常被称为T.D.的李政道于1926年11月24日出生在上海，是拥有化工背景的商人李庆功和张明昌六个孩子中的老三。李说，他成长于一个“学习型家庭”）
He was in high school when war broke out between China and Japan, forcing him to abandon his studies. It was during this time that he discovered physics. Stumbling across some science books, he was immediately intrigued, but as he was no longer receiving a formal education, he was left to teach himself. It helped him develop his own approach to solving problems.（中日战争爆发时，他还在上高中，被迫放弃学业。正是在这段时间里，他发现了物理学。偶然发现一些科学书籍，他立刻被吸引了，但由于他不再接受正规教育，他只能自学。这帮助他发展了自己解决问题的方法。）
In the 2007 interview, he recalled tackling Newton’s laws,particularly Newton’s famous equation of force equals mass times acceleration, based on what he could glean from the books.（在2007年的采访中，他回忆起根据他从书中收集到的信息，研究牛顿定律，特别是牛顿著名的力等于质量乘以加速度的方程。）
“Newton realized the force is a function of space, and he knew the function,” Dr. Lee said. “One was elasticity. It’s linear in the distance. And the other one is gravitation. So once the left-hand side is a nonfunction of space and the right-hand side is acceleration, then you can solve it to be right. I thought, ‘That’s interesting’ But that was not the thing that was stated in the book,so this was my approach.”（“牛顿意识到力是空间的函数，他知道这个函数，”李博士说。“一个是弹性。它在距离上是线性的。另一个是引力。所以，一旦左手边是空间的非函数，右手边是加速度，那么你就可以解出它是正确的。我想，‘这很有趣’，但这不是书中所说的，所以这是我的方法。”）
In 1943, despite not having a high school diploma, he was admitted to National Chekiang University (now Zhejiang University), which had moved to Guizhou because of the war. Though he started as a student in chemical engineering, he switched to physics when his professors discovered his talent in that field.（1943年，尽管没有高中文凭，他还是考入了因战争而搬到贵州的国立浙江大学（现浙江大学）。虽然他最初是一名化学工程专业的学生，但当他的教授发现他在该领域的天赋时，他转向了物理学。）
The continuing war with Japan forced Dr. Lee in 1945 to switch to National Southwestern Associated University in Kunming, where Dr. Yang, his future collaborator, had also studied. At the university, Ta-You Wu, an influential atomic and nuclear physicist, nominated Dr. Lee for a Chinese government fellowship to study in the United States. By 1946, Dr. Lee, who had completed only two years of college, was at the University of Chicago, having been accepted as a doctoral student.（与日本的持续战争迫使李于1945年转学到昆明国立西南联大，他未来的合作者杨也曾在那里学习。在这所大学，有影响力的原子核物理学家吴大佑提名李博士为中国政府赴美留学奖学金获得者。1946年，仅完成两年大学学业的李博士已被芝加哥大学录取为博士生。）
At the time, the University of Chicago was one of the world’s premier centers for the study of physics. The department was led by Enrico Fermi, the Italian-born physicist who had overseen the first successful nuclear reaction and who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1938. Dr. Lee became Dr. Fermi’s sole doctoral student in theoretical physics, meeting with him every week.（当时，芝加哥大学是世界上首屈一指的物理研究中心之一。该部门由意大利出生的物理学家恩里科·费米领导，他监督了第一次成功的核反应，并于1938年获得诺贝尔奖。李博士成为费米博士唯一的理论物理学博士生，每周都与他见面。）
It was an extraordinary learning experience, partly because of Dr.Fermi’s teaching technique, which Dr. Lee explained in the 2007 interview with the Nobel Institute.（这是一次非同寻常的学习经历，部分原因是费米博士的教学技巧，李博士在2007年接受诺贝尔研究所采访时对此进行了解释。）
" ‘You see,’ he said, ‘there are things that I would like to know,’ " Dr.Lee recalled Dr. Fermi saying. " ‘Lee, why don’t you look up and give me a lecture next week.’ "（“‘你看，’他说，‘有些事情我想知道，’”李回忆起费米说。“李，你为什么不抬头看看，下周给我做个讲座。”）
“I was very happy to teach Fermi,” Dr. Lee added. “Of course, this is an excellent way of building the student’s confidence. And then he would ask me questions and I would have to answer.”（李博士补充道：“我很高兴能教费米。”。“当然，这是建立学生信心的好方法。然后他会问我问题，我必须回答。”）
Dr. Lee received his Ph.D. in 1950. Over the next three years, he worked at Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wis., as a guest lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He was then hired by Columbia University as an assistant professor.（李博士于1950年获得博士学位。在接下来的三年里，他在威斯康星州威廉姆斯湾的耶基斯天文台工作，在加州大学伯克利分校和普林斯顿大学高级研究所担任客座讲师。随后，他被哥伦比亚大学聘为助理教授。）
Dr. Lee received many awards aside from the Nobel, including the Albert Einstein Award in Science, and he had a minor planet (3443Leetsungdao) named for him.（除了诺贝尔奖，李还获得了许多其他奖项，包括阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦科学奖，他还有一颗小行星（3443Leetsungdao）以他的名字命名。）
In 1950, he married Jeannette Hui-Chun Chin. She died in 1996. He is survived by his sons, James and Stephen; his brother, Xuedao Li; his sister, Yayun Li; seven grandchildren; and a great-grandson. Dr. Lee became a United States citizen in 1962.（1950年，他与珍妮特·许春琴结婚。她于1996年去世。他身后留下了他的儿子詹姆斯和斯蒂芬；他的兄弟李学道；他的妹妹李亚云；七个孙子；还有一个曾孙。李于1962年成为美国公民。）
Dr. Lee remained fairly modest about the discovery that brought him the Nobel Prize. It was the product of insight about something that, it turned out, was hiding in plain sight.（李对他获得诺贝尔奖的发现仍然相当谦虚。事实证明，这是对隐藏在众目睽睽之下的东西的洞察力的产物。）
Nobody saw it before “because it was a mental block,” he said in the 2007 interview. “Nobody looked for it.”（他在2007年的采访中说，以前没有人见过它，“因为它是一种精神障碍”，“没人找它。”）
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
P.S.这一篇文章笔者转载于微博英语时事博主的截图，微博链接为「https://weibo.com/5371314996/Or0Hvth3r」。李先生与杨先生获诺奖的论文《弱相互作用中的宇称守恒质疑》，网站Latex的文章介绍页面与下载链接「https://ask.latexstudio.net/ask/article/795.html?continueFlag=963156f081e73a75324b1a92455092ae」。
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