You have asked for my comments on the qualifications of T. D. Lee. This is an easy assignment: I can say either that he is the youngest of the absolutely top flight theoretical physicists in the world, or that he is the best theoretical physicist of his age. He is extraordinarily imaginative, original, and productive. He has worked in fields as diverse as the theory of turbulence, the statistical theory of phase transitions, the multiple production of mesons, the dynamics of strange particle production, and the applications of group theory to the selection rules of subnuclear matter. His work is elegant, novel, and lucid, though on occasion he has undertaken massive programs of computation when there was no other way to derive the consequences of proposed physical laws.
He is a lucid expositor; even a brief look at his published papers will indicate that. He has collaborated widely, and with men of different skill and talent and interest. He is, as far as I know, held in universal high regard, and, among those with whom he is acquainted, with universal affection. In character, he is robust, simple, humorous, and gentle.
回複 'qiao6' 的評論 : 可以看紐時文章，作者是個象棋專家。他沒有說李政道具體是否讓Jack Steinberg做實驗，但是正是李政道讓吳健雄做的實驗。三個原因導致吳健雄與諾貝爾無緣：1。李政道透露了消息；2。其他競爭者做出同樣結果幾乎同時發表；3。吳的實驗是與標準局全作做的，標準局與哥大可能會分些功勞。這樣諾貝爾委員會就決定不發給實驗科學家了，很是遺憾。NYT三天前文章片段：“ 翻譯：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.
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.
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.
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.”
