Underrated even among physicists. Among the immediate post war generation his contributions are up there with Feynman and Schwinger.
To quote Freeman Dyson: "Professor Yang is, after Einstein and Dirac, the preeminent stylist of the 20th
century physics. From his early days as a student in China to his later years as the
sage of Stony Brook, he has always been guided in his thinking by a love of exact
analysis and formal mathematical beauty. This love led him to his most profound
and original contribution to physics, the discovery with Robert Mills of non-Abelian
gauge fields. With the passage of time, his discovery of non-Abelian gauge fields
is gradually emerging as a greater and more important event than the spectacular
discovery of parity non-conservation which earned him the Nobel Prize."
The Yang in Yang-Mills is the same Yang as Lee-Yang! Somehow I had those filed as a different generation, where Lee-Yang is "old", and Yang-Mills is "young". I'm an idiot
The path from Lee-Yang to Yang-Mills is short (~months) but the shortness is instructive
(It's more than just a lesson in style, imho. Lee-Yang could become more famous than Yang-Mills, in time! Like you're implying there-- that was a honest mistake on your part; your claim to "idiocy" teaches less than it might seem :).
Do you suppose small-gauge railroads are too niche an interest? Or is "gauging" interest not friendly?
It's abstractions all the way down, but the term was coined in its still generally used definition of "scale". To explain the concept to the general public, keep it simple and poetic. If they want to unpack your metaphor, they're going to need a few years of university physics education!
Sad news. Perhaps the last connection to OG physics. I was fortunate to meet Dr Yang a few times. Surreal to hear him describe working for Fermi and Oppenheimer and his reaction on hearing about the Hiroshima detonation.
It was a long time ago but I remember Fermi decided that he (Yang) didn't do well at experimental physics, saying "where there's a Yang, there's a bang". My impression was that the atomic bomb wasn't a surprise, with the idea that when the ship arrived he'd enter a new world as a result. He was Oppenheimer's assistant at Princeton. I don't think I knew that at the time, so he must have told me but I don't recall any details. We also had a discussion about Maxwell but his later article on the subject is a much better source than my fading memory.
There’s a fascinating story about S Chandrasekhar (of Chandrasekhar limit fame) driving 100 miles to teach him every week. Teaching two students, the professor got a Nobel prize and the two students got a Nobel prize.
“ One story in particular illustrates Chandrasekhar's devotion to his science and his students. In the 1940s, while he was based at the University's Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wis., he drove more than 100 miles round-trip each week to teach a class of just two registered students. Any concern about the cost-effectiveness of such a commitment was erased in 1957, when the entire class -- T.D. Lee and C.N. Yang -- won the Nobel Prize in physics.”
Chandrasekhar was a good friend of my father and from my childhood I remember Chandrasekhar and his wife being super-nice people. Thanks for sharing the story about his two students.
I don't think it's a crackpot theory. The basic idea is that the gauge group is the group of rescalings of the units of money, and arbitrage appears as curvature in the gauge field, i.e. you end up with a net change when you parallel-transport money around a loop in the (discrete) space of assets and time.
It's a trivial statement since many equities are correlated on a multidimensional manifold of characteristics. Jim Simons was just early and now rentech is nothing special.
Rentec is still world renowned after pioneering the quant business 40+ years ago. I don't think the rested on their laurels with some easy thing that they just stumbled on early
I don't know what "notes" you are referring to, but if you mean the chapters of The Feynman Lectures on Physics, the recordings and photos of Feynman's 2-year Caltech course on Introductory Physics were the source material from which they were made. When these edited versions of Feynman's lectures were created there was no intention of publishing the lecture recordings or photos - indeed there was no intention of publishing them as a book! You can find all the recordings and lecture photos, as well as Feynman's lecture notes and other materials related to The Feynman Lectures on Physics at www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu.
In addition to the Yang Mills theory, parity nonconservation, phase transition theory, and the Yang Baxter equation, these are also among Yang Zhenning’s important theoretical achievements. Moreover, he has made numerous academic contributions in areas such as the integral formulation of gauge fields and cold atom research.
Readit News
To quote Freeman Dyson: "Professor Yang is, after Einstein and Dirac, the preeminent stylist of the 20th century physics. From his early days as a student in China to his later years as the sage of Stony Brook, he has always been guided in his thinking by a love of exact analysis and formal mathematical beauty. This love led him to his most profound and original contribution to physics, the discovery with Robert Mills of non-Abelian gauge fields. With the passage of time, his discovery of non-Abelian gauge fields is gradually emerging as a greater and more important event than the spectacular discovery of parity non-conservation which earned him the Nobel Prize."
(It's more than just a lesson in style, imho. Lee-Yang could become more famous than Yang-Mills, in time! Like you're implying there-- that was a honest mistake on your part; your claim to "idiocy" teaches less than it might seem :).
See this comment which might seem completely throwaway https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45632370)
In the same vein, here is a short-note of Yang, readable to nonscientists, here:
https://doi.org/10.1142/S0217751X03017142
(He rebuts Dyson)
Necessary Subtlety and Unnecessary Subtlety
Some say that list of stylists would not be meaningful without von Neumann (although Dyson might say that frogs have no style*)
https://youtu.be/OmaSAG4J6nw?t=24m19s
Please see next slide for a minimal example of a "real(!) gauge field", even if you don't like philosophy of physics.
*https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17457678
Do you suppose small-gauge railroads are too niche an interest? Or is "gauging" interest not friendly?
It's abstractions all the way down, but the term was coined in its still generally used definition of "scale". To explain the concept to the general public, keep it simple and poetic. If they want to unpack your metaphor, they're going to need a few years of university physics education!
I always wished they gave this thing a better name but I have no idea what.
Some of his work: http://home.ustc.edu.cn/~lxsphys/2021-3-18/The%20conceptual%...
And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang%E2%80%93Mills_theory
What did he have to say?
“ One story in particular illustrates Chandrasekhar's devotion to his science and his students. In the 1940s, while he was based at the University's Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wis., he drove more than 100 miles round-trip each week to teach a class of just two registered students. Any concern about the cost-effectiveness of such a commitment was erased in 1957, when the entire class -- T.D. Lee and C.N. Yang -- won the Nobel Prize in physics.”
Source: https://chronicle.uchicago.edu/951012/chandra.shtml
He once "leaked" the idea that Jim Simon's trading success came from his use of ideas called "gauge theory" and "fibre bundles".
I forgot the exact timestamp, but you will have to watch the entire interview to find that segment — https://youtu.be/zVWlapujbfo
https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9710148
https://www.amazon.com/Physics-Finance-Modelling-Non-Equilib...
I don't think it's a crackpot theory. The basic idea is that the gauge group is the group of rescalings of the units of money, and arbitrage appears as curvature in the gauge field, i.e. you end up with a net change when you parallel-transport money around a loop in the (discrete) space of assets and time.
RenTech is quite secretive, but this supports the rumors that simple graphical models for time series were behind some of their trading strategies.
Deleted Comment
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/flptapes.html
#52 Symmetry in physical laws
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Chen-Ning
RIP
Rest In Peace.