How did Chen-ning Yang miss out on a second Nobel Prize in physics?
Chinese scientist is remembered as one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, alongside Albert Einstein
Could a Chinese scientist have joined their ranks?
Yang’s long-time friend Chen Fong-ching, an honorary professor at the physics department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said that since the 1980s, many scientists had suggested that Yang deserved a second Nobel.
Yang and Lee made history in 1957 as the first Chinese-born scientists to be awarded the Nobel Prize for physics for another discovery that challenged an orthodox concept known as parity, the idea that a decaying particle would always result in the same number of sub-particles.
In a landmark paper published in 1956, the duo suggested experiments that would show the number of sub-particles created by a decaying particle could vary.