Chen Ning Yang, 2005 (Courtesy: Alanmak, via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported)

And now for something completely different! Tonight I was way out of my comfort zone, mixing as I was with physicists and mathematicians at an event involving staff, students, alumni (pas moi, but Mr Gums) of the Research School of Physics and Engineering at the Australian National University (ANU). The event involved a reception followed by a lecture given by Nobel Laureate in Physics, Chen Ning Yang. I would of course have been more excited had the Laureate been Patrick White but that would have been a bit weird given he died in 1990 and, anyhow, a Nobel Laureate is a Nobel Laureate, n’est-ce pas? The gobsmacking thing was that Professor Yang was born in October 1922. Yes, he’s nearly 88, and in the introduction we were told he’s about to move back to Stony Brook University in the USA because there are some exciting things going on there!

The topic of the lecture was, wait for it:

How mathematics and physics got together again!

I’ll spare you the details – not of course because I couldn’t understand all the “beautiful” formulae for exciting things like gauge theory but because I would want to bore you! I will say, though, that the lecture ended with the statement that maths and physics got together again in the second half of the 20th century when the two disciplines realised they both used F.F and F.F tilde (the tilde is supposed to be above the F but I can’t find that in my PopChar list). If you can understand what all that F-stuff means, you’re ahead of me.

The funny thing is, though, that I rather enjoyed the lecture. Sure, it was peppered with many incomprehensible (to me) formulae, but he was absolutely charming and there was, in fact, an engaging story amongst it all. For the rest of the audience it may have been an inspiring science lecture, but for me it was more like a wonderful fable (you know, like “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse”). Each to her own, I say …

Is there a reason for all this, do I hear you ask, beyond an esoteric intellectual exercise? Well, apparently there is and it has to do with money. Physics has always been closely tied to the real, that is, physical world, but Mathematics has not. By reconnecting with Physics and thereby the physical world, Professor Yang somewhat cheekily said, Mathematics finds itself in a better position to attract funding. In other words, our world, as many of we humanities-focused people know only too well, is much happier when there is some practical application to intellectual pursuit!

POSTSCRIPT: I am, funnily enough, in the middle of writing my post on Ian McEwan’s Solar, which is about a Nobel Laureate physicist. In the book, the physicist refers to the Dirac equation and says “a thing of pure beauty, that equation…”. If you look at the article on it in Wikipedia you will see the sorts (though not the same) of equations I refer to in this post.