Quartermasters can also fight the devils

The United States paid countless hardships and paid a huge price from researching atomic fission to actually producing atomic bombs for actual combat, and it developed nuclear weapons one step ahead of France, Germany, England and the Soviet Union.

The effects of using atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan not only made the United States realize the powerful power of atomic bombs, but also made the United States realize that the United States, which possessed atomic bombs, had become a significant deterrent in the new post-war world pattern.

As a result, the United States classified the manufacturing technology of the atomic bomb as a core military secret and began to refuse to teach it to foreign countries, even including England, its closest ally, not to mention China, its weak ally. This made the original goal of the Chinese government to establish a national defense research institution a pipe dream.

In desperation, Wu Dayou and three other professors communicated with the Military and Political Department of the Chinese government and decided to find a different way. With the help of the Chinese government's funding, they changed the original investigation and study team specializing in atomic energy technology into a team of publicly funded overseas students. All members of the team were arranged to teach at suitable universities, or choose suitable cutting-edge scientific and technological majors to continue their studies.

Professor Wu Ta-you taught at the University of Michigan and Columbia University in the United States. He returned to Taiwan in 1956 and became the president of the Academia Sinica in Taipei in 1983. He later participated in academic activities on both sides of the Taiwan Strait many times.

Professor Hua Luogeng served as a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the United States and the University of Illinois. In February 1950, he returned to Beijing and became the director of the Department of Mathematics at Tsinghua University.

Although Professor Zeng Zhaolun was a chemist, he was the one in the team who had the most knowledge about nuclear weapons in the United States. Professor Zeng Zhaolun was the only one who had contact with the cyclotron for two months. Later, after the United States banned Professor Zeng Zhaolun from contacting the cyclotron, Professor Zeng Zhaolun went to the University of Chicago to study for a period of time.

In 1947, Professor Zeng Zhaolun applied for one million US dollars from the Chinese government to build an accelerator. Later, when the research came to nothing, he was invited by the English Cultural Council to visit and study in England, and then returned to Hong Kong to write the book "Atoms and Atomic Energy".

Professor Zeng Zhaolun returned to Tianjin from Hong Kong in March 1949, and then served as the Dean of Academic Affairs and Director of the Department of Chemistry at Peking University. In 1951, he served as Vice Minister of Education and Vice Minister of Higher Education. In 1957, he advocated reform of the old teaching system. In 1958, he served as Professor of the Department of Chemistry and Director of the Section of Elemental Organic Chemistry at Wuhan University.

As for the other six students, Tang Aoqing entered the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University in the United States, Zhu Guangya chose the University of Michigan in the United States, Sun Benwang went to New York University in the United States, Wang Rui went to Washington University in St. Louis in the United States, and Xu Xianxiu entered Brown University in the United States.

At that time, 19-year-old Tsung-Dao Lee was the youngest among them. Before he graduated from university, he was admitted to the University of Chicago in the United States as an exception. After entering the University of Chicago in the United States, Lee studied under the American physicist Fermi.

In June 1950, Tsung-Dao Lee received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Chicago in the United States for his thesis "Hydrogen Content in White Dwarfs". He was hailed as the "child prodigy doctor" because he was less than 30 years old when he was promoted to professor of physics at Columbia University, which also set a record for the youngest professor at Columbia University in the United States since its founding in 1754.

On April 11, 1958, Tsung-Dao Lee was elected as a member of the second term of the Academia Sinica in Taipei. He was less than 32 years old at the time and still holds the record as the youngest person elected as a member of the academy.

Li Zhengdao has a keen physical intuition, profound vision and broad perspective. He has long been immersed in the wonderful world of physics and claims that physics is his way of life. His research fields are wide-ranging, including high-energy physics, that is, particle physics, quantum field theory, nuclear physics, statistical physics, astrophysics, fluid dynamics, many-body physics and solid state physics (later evolved into condensed matter physics), quantum mechanics and general relativity. He has made many achievements in theoretical structure and phenomenological analysis, and has made outstanding contributions to the progress and development of contemporary physics, especially high-energy physics.

Starting from April 1956, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang worked together to tackle the "θ-t mystery", a key problem that puzzled the international physics community at that time. They boldly broke through the shackles of the universality of parity conservation and took the change of the detection quantity from a two-dimensional scalar to a three-dimensional pseudoscalar as a breakthrough.

On October 1, 1956, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang jointly published the groundbreaking classic paper "Questions on the Conservation of Parity in Weak Interactions", which was the first to comprehensively and systematically propose the Lee-Yang hypothesis. At the beginning of the following year, this hypothesis was perfectly verified by the Chien-Shiung Wu group and Gavin Lederman group at Columbia University in the United States and the Talgeddy group at the University of Chicago. The mystery of θ-t was soon successfully solved, proving that the θ meson and the t meson are actually the same particle, the electrically neutral K meson. The Lee-Yang hypothesis was then upgraded to the law of parity non-conservation in weak interactions, which caused a sensation in the international scientific community.

On October 31, 1957, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Professor Chen Ning Yang of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Professor Tsung-Dao Lee of the Department of Physics at Columbia University were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics that year. The reason for the award was "for their profound research on the law of parity nonconservation in weak interactions and the many important discoveries about elementary particles that resulted from it." Together, Tsung-Dao Lee and Yang became the first Chinese to win the Nobel Prize.

It took only thirteen months from the official publication of the paper "Questions on the Conservation of Parity in Weak Interactions" by Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang on October 1, 1956 to winning the Nobel Prize for this major theoretical achievement. This also set the record for the fastest award in the history of the Nobel Prize, and this record has not been broken to this day.

In 1964, Tsung-Dao Lee was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, and in the same year he became the first Fermi Chair Professor at Columbia University. In 1984, he was appointed as the highest honorary professor at Columbia University. In 1994, he was elected as one of the first foreign members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. On November 24, 2004, the Department of Physics at Columbia University held a grand retirement ceremony for Tsung-Dao Lee.

On August 4, 2024, with the passing of Nobel Prize winner in Physics Mr. Tsung-Dao Lee, all members of the Chinese government’s “Atomic Bomb Seed Project” 78 years ago also passed away.

At that time, the nine of them planned to study atomic bomb technology. Although they did not directly learn the technology of manufacturing atomic bombs, after returning to China, Zhu Guangya, a member of the team, through independent and arduous research and experiments, actually "all roads lead to Rome" and finally became an expert in the "two bombs and one satellite" of New China.