On Impacts of Yang & Fang to Physics in China

Both physicists C. N. Yang and L. Z. Fang live in China for a long time. Thus, presumably they have strong impacts to physics in China. Since they are well-known, many believed that their influence would be all positive. However, recently a closer look shows that this may not be the case because their impacts to the development of general relativity are very negative. Let us consider the details.

First, both Fang and Yang, like many other theorists, misunderstood Einstein’s equivalence principle [1, 2]. They considered his principle and Pauli’s version are essentially the same. Pauli claims that there is a neighborhood of local Minkowski space at any point, and thus gravity of small neighborhood can be transformed way with a coordinate transformation. However, Einstein shows that Pauli version is a misinterpretation with an example. Einstein remarked in his 1916 paper [1; p.144], “For it is clear that, e.g., the gravitational field generated by a material point in its environment certainly cannot be ‘transformed away’ by any choice of the system of coordinates┅” Consequently, both have mistaken Einstein’s 1916 principle as his 1911 assumption of equivalence between the acceleration and the uniform Newtonian gravity [3]. These errors show that both Fang and Yang have an inadequate background in pure mathematics, functional analysis in particular. For instance, they also failed to understand the mathematical theorems related to Einstein’s equivalence principle [4]

Second, because of inadequate background in mathematics, both of them failed to see that there is no dynamic solution for the Einstein equation [5, 6]. Thus, they also failed to see that the space-time singularity theorems of Penrose and Hawking are irrelevant to physics because their assumption violates the principle of causality.

Third, Yang still believes in the invalid gauge invariance [7, 8], and thus he is against Zhou’s view on invalidity of Einstein’s covariance principle [9, 10]. As shown by Aharonov & Bohm [11] in 1959, the electromagnetic potentials are physically effective; and all the physical non-Abelian gauge theories, as shown by Weinberg [12], are not gauge invariant. The crucial point is, however that for a non-Abelian theory in physics, there are different elements representing distinct particles, and thus the whole theory cannot be gauge invariant.

Fourth, Zhou’s proposal of the harmonic gauge for an asymptotically flat metric [9, 13] was misrepresented as unconditional by L. Z. Fang.

These explain, in part, why Zhou’s [9, 10] theory was not understood, and in China there was little theoretical progress in the field of gravitation for about 30 years.

References:

1.       A. Einstein, H. A. Lorentz, H. Minkowski, H. Weyl, The Principle of Relativity (Dover, 1923).

2.       A. Einstein, The Meaning of Relativity (1921) (Princeton Univ. Press, 1954).

3.       L. Z. Fang & R. Ruffini, The Basic Concepts of Relativistic Astrophysics (Shanghai High Technology Press, 1981).

4.       J. L. Synge, Relativity; The General Theory (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1971).

5.       C. Y. Lo, Astrophysical Journal 455, 421-428 (Dec. 20, 1995).

6.       C. Y. Lo, GJSFR Volume 12 Issue 4 Version 1.0, 5-15 (June 2012).

7.       C. N. Yang Phys. Rev. Lett. 33: 445 (1974).

8.       C. N. Yang & R. L. Mills, Phys. Rev. 96, 191 (1954); Ron Shaw, Ph. D. thesis, Cambridge University (1955).

9.       Zhou Pei-Yuan, Proc. of the 3rd Grossmann Meetings on Gen. Relativ. ed. Hu Ning, Sci. Press/North Holland (1983), 1-20.

10.    Zhou Pei-yuan, Proc. of International Symposium on Experimental Gravitational Physics (Guangzhou, 3-8 Aug. 1987), edited by P. F. Michelson, 110-116 (World Sci., Singapore).

11.    Y. Aharonov & D. Bohm, Phys. Rev. 115, 485 (1959).

12.    S. Weinberg, The Quantum Theory of Fields (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000).

13.    Peng Huang-Wu, Commun. Theor. Phys. (Beijing, China), 31, 13-20 (1999).