Where there is an explosion, there are Yang Zhenning's jokes.

"Where there is an explosion, there is Yang Zhenning." This joke shows that Yang Zhenning's practical ability is worse than others. There are always mistakes when doing experiments, which lead to explosions. Others laughed at him with this sentence.

Background:

Ellison(xn) is a professor of physics at the University of Chicago. At that time, he was preparing to build an accelerator with 400,000 electron volts, which was the most advanced at that time. On Fermi's recommendation, Yang Zhenning became one of six graduate students of Ellison. However, in the nearly 20 months of working in the laboratory, Yang Zhenning's physical experiments went very smoothly, and explosions often occurred during the experiment, so that there was a joke circulating in the laboratory at that time: where there was an explosion, there was Yang Zhenning. At this point, Yang Zhenning had to admit painfully that his hands-on ability was worse than others!

One day, Dr. Taylor, who has been paying attention to Yang Zhenning and is known as the father of American hydrogen bombs, asked Yang Zhenning with concern: "Isn't your experiment very successful?"

"yes." Facing the respected predecessors, Yang Zhenning said sincerely.

"I don't think you need to insist on writing an experimental paper. You wrote a theoretical paper. I suggest you enrich your doctoral thesis. I can be your mentor. " Taylor said bluntly to Yang Zhenning.

Yang Zhenning listened to Taylor's words, and his mood was very complicated. On the one hand, he felt from the bottom of his heart that he really couldn't do the experiment; On the other hand, he is unwilling to admit defeat, and he very much hopes to make up for his lack of experimental ability by writing an experimental paper. He is very grateful to Taylor for his concern, but it is not easy for him to give up the plan.

"I want to think about it and tell you in a couple of days." Yang Zhenning said earnestly.

Yang Zhenning thought hard for two days.

Finally, he accepted Taylor's suggestion and gave up his plan to write an experimental paper. From then on, he was relieved and resolutely turned his main direction to theoretical physics research. Finally, in June of 1957 and 10, he and Li Zhengdao won the Nobel Prize in Physics that year.