Meet Yang Zhenning, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist even President Xi Jinping wishes happy birthday to
- Yang Zhenning is about to turn 99 years old. Xi Jinping wished him a happy birthday
- The physicist won China’s first Nobel Prize and helped create an important maths problem
Not many people can expect to receive a personalised flower basket from one of the most powerful people in the world, but for Nobel laureate physicist Yang Zhenning, a happy birthday greeting from Chinese President Xi Jinping comes with the territory.
1957 Nobel Prize in Physics
Yang and his colleague Li Zhengdao were the first Chinese winners of the Nobel Prize in 1957 for their work in particle physics.
Specifically, they were at the forefront of disproving parity laws, which investigate the idea of whether nature can be right-handed or left-handed, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Before Li and Yang, scientists had long assumed that humanity’s preference for right-left-handedness was a function of our brain, not of nature. The assumption was that a mirror image of one object would perform identically to the original.
Li and Yang showed that, by reversing the magnetic field on cobalt-60, a radioactive atom, the original and mirror object had a different rate of radioactive decay. Hence, in some instances, the mirror does not perform identically to the original.