Chairman Mao is known to the world as the main founder and leader of the People's Republic of China, and he is also a great proletarian revolutionary, statesman, military man, and great philosopher. Chairman Mao's level of philosophical cognition is extremely high, which makes his knowledge of various scientific theories first-class, and even the famous Nobel Prize winner yang Zhenning is admired.
In 1973, Chairman Mao received Yang Zhenning, a meeting of great thinkers, philosophers and great scientists. When Chairman Mao met with Yang Zhenning, the nobel laureate in physics, he talked for an hour and a half, talking about the infinite division of matter, the future development of science, and many other contents. Afterwards, Yang Zhenning praised Chairman Mao for his profound knowledge and extraordinary insight into the world of science, as well as the first-class knowledge of physics in China.
Born in Anhui Province in 1922, Yang Zhenning was gifted from an early age and was admitted to Southwest United University at the age of 16, which was the best university in China at that time, consisting of National Peking University, National Tsinghua University, and the private Nankai University, and moved west to Kunming under the influence of the War of Resistance. He obtained a master's degree after graduating from the Tsinghua Research Institute of Southwest United University, and later taught at Tsinghua High School. Here he met Du Zhili, the beloved daughter of Du Yuming, a senior Kuomintang general, and married him. In 1945, Yang Zhenning left China and was admitted to the University of Chicago as a doctoral student, and received a doctorate, entering Princeton College, chaired by Oppenheimer, which gathered the world's best physics talents. At the then Princeton Institute, a new physics discipline, quantum physics, was rapidly evolving. From 1955 to 1956, Yang Zhenning cooperated with Li Zhengdao to propose a new theory of cosmological non-conservation, which was later proved by the experiments of Wu Jianxiong and others, which became the cornerstone of the weak action theory in modern physics. Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao jointly won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for this outstanding achievement.
Yang Zhenning, who won the award, immediately became a figure who attracted worldwide attention, and also attracted the great attention of the Communist Party of China and Taiwan's Kuomintang. Both the Kuomintang and the Communists are actively taking action to extend an invitation to this world's advanced talent. In Beijing, Premier Zhou immediately sent Yang Zhenning's teacher, Zhang Wenyu, to contact Du Yuming, whose father-in-law was still in the war criminals management center; in Taipei, Chiang Kai-shek immediately summoned Du Yuming's wife, Yang Zhenning's mother-in-law, Ms. Cao Xiuqing. Therefore, Yang Zhenning's appearance on the mainland or in Taiwan has an unusual significance, which has been related to many major issues such as politics and diplomacy.
Soon after, Zhang Wenyu, then director of the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was instructed by Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou and came to the United States with a letter written by Du Yuming himself to congratulate his student Yang Zhenning. When Zhang Wenyu handed the letter to Yang Zhenning, Yang Zhenning was excited. After that, Yang Wuzhi, who was still teaching at Fudan University, Yang Zhenning's father, also personally went to meet his son. And he talked freely with his son about the achievements and new ideas of New China, which had a great impact on Yang Zhenning after that.
After Nixon was elected president of the United States in 1969, he asked government officials to explore the possibility of official contact with China. In 1970, Chairman Mao received Chinese's old friend, the American writer Edgar Snow. As early as 1936, Snow interviewed Chairman Mao in Yan'an and reported on the deeds of the Communist Party's military and civilian struggle in Yan'an. Mao Zedong told Snow that China welcomed Nixon's visit to China.
In 1971, taking advantage of the thawing of Sino-US relations, Chinese-American scientist Yang Zhenning chose to return to China to visit relatives. He was personally received by Premier Zhou and held a welcome banquet for him. In 1973, when Yang Zhenning returned to China to visit his relatives for the third time, he proposed to the head of the tourism bureau that he wanted to see Chairman Mao, and the next day he told the person in charge that this idea was inappropriate. After all, he knew Chairman Mao's position in the eyes of the whole country, but the people at the Tourism Bureau told him not to apologize, because everyone loved Chairman Mao and met Chairman Mao.
Du Zhili and Yang Zhenning
Perhaps because the people from the Tourism Bureau conveyed Yang Zhenning's thoughts, Yang Zhenning received a notice the next day that Chairman Mao wanted to see him when he was free. On July 17, 1973, accompanied by Premier Zhou, the Association for Science and Technology, and others, Chairman Mao met with Yang Zhenning. This meeting is of great significance and is of great positive significance to developing Sino-US friendly relations, promoting the development of science and technology on the mainland, attracting outstanding Overseas Chinese scientists, and publicizing the achievements of New China.
During the meeting, Chairman Mao spoke with a very heavy Hunan accent, many words Yang Zhenning did not hear clearly, and Premier Zhou, who was beside him, was busy translating. The content of Chairman Mao's speech was very broad, and there were hundreds of sons and daughters, and there was nothing in ancient and modern China and abroad. For the physics that Yang Zhenning is familiar with, Chairman Mao also understands it very deeply. Talking about whether light quanta are separable, Chairman Mao quipped: "Matter is infinitely separable. If matter becomes indivisible in one stage, what will you scientists do ten thousand years from now? It made everyone present laugh.
After this meeting, the news media in various localities interviewed Yang Zhenning on many occasions and asked Yang Zhenning to talk freely about his feelings about this meeting. Yang Zhenning expressed his views and feelings on this meeting on different occasions, first of all, he believed that Mao Zedong was a thinker, a leader, a person who attached great importance to reality, and also paid close attention to the development of contemporary high-energy physics, especially his own views on the question of whether elementary particles can be divided. He was both a leader and a senior scholar, and Mao Zedong was very deep in the study of scientific knowledge, interested in concepts in various fields, and had extraordinary insight.
In fact, Chairman Mao's profound understanding of physics comes from his profound philosophical foundation, Chairman Mao's love of reading, historical classics, hundreds of sons, ancient and modern China and foreign familiar. For example, the thought of the famous Gongsun Long in the pre-Qin period: "One foot of pounding, half of the day, inexhaustible." This wireless dichotomy is the same as the paradoxical idea of the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno's Achilles chasing the turtle. This infinite dichotomy also provided a theoretical basis for Chairman Mao's belief that matter is infinitely divisible. Another example is Gongsun Long's theory of "white horses not horses", Chairman Mao said in the conversation: "Speaking of people, it is pointed out that people have men and women, and men are people, but not people, or women are people and not people. It can be seen that Chairman Mao has a very clear understanding of abstract and figurative concepts.
In ancient times, "white horse is not a horse" has always been a joke of the literati and inkers after tea and dinner, and many ordinary people in modern society still think that he is a fallacy. "White horse is not a horse" is the theory of abstraction and figuration, the so-called horse is an abstract concept, the horse is invisible and untouchable, and the white horse is a figurative concept, referring to a concrete white horse. All you can see must be a horse of white, black, or some other color.
As early as the 1950s, in a conversation with Li Siguang and Qian Sanqiang, Mao Zedong said that from a philosophical point of view, matter is infinitely separable, and atoms, neutrons, and electrons should also be separable. He said that one is divided into two, and the opposite is unified. You don't believe, I believe anyway. They have not been made in the laboratory yet, and in the future, they will prove to be separable. Chairman Mao's idea of the infinite divisibility of matter has given dialectical and materialistic content to the divisibility of matter and promoted the development of microphysics. Mainland physicists used Mao Zedong's theoretical viewpoint to conduct in-depth research, and in early 1966, a new theory of hadron structure was proposed in Beijing, the layer submodel, insisting that elementary particles are not basic, and the structure is still infinitely separable. This theory attracted widespread attention from the world's high-energy physicists at that time.
As a pioneer of the times, Chairman Mao knew that the development of New China needed this scientific knowledge, and in order to encourage and promote the beginning and development of China's science and technology, he decided to set an example by example, taking the lead in setting an example, and it can be said that he began to explore this difficult discipline from scratch. But he can reach a very high standard and is an example that we will always be worth learning!