Topology And Physics

by Chen Ning Yang, Mo-Lin Ge, Yang-hui He

'The book is an engaging and influential collection of significant contributions from an assembly of world expert leaders and pioneers from different fields, working at the interface between topology and physics or applications of topology to physical systems … The book explores many interesting and novel topics that lie at the intersection between gravity, quantum fields, condensed matter, physical cosmology and topology … A rich, well-organized, and comprehensive overview of remarkable and insightful connections between physics and topology is here made available to the physics reader.'Contemporary PhysicsSince its birth in Poincaré's seminal 1894 'Analysis Situs', topology has become a cornerstone of mathematics. As with all beautiful mathematical concepts, topology inevitably — resonating with that Wignerian principle of the effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences — finds its prominent role in physics. From Chern-Simons theory to topological quantum field theory, from knot invariants to Calabi-Yau compactification in string theory, from spacetime topology in cosmology to the recent Nobel Prize winning work on topological insulators, the interactions between topology and physics have been a triumph over the past few decades.In this eponymous volume, we are honoured to have contributions from an assembly of grand masters of the field, guiding us with their world-renowned expertise on the subject of the interplay between 'Topology' and 'Physics'. Beginning with a preface by Chen Ning Yang on his recollections of the early days, we proceed to a novel view of nuclei from the perspective of complex geometry by Sir Michael Atiyah and Nick Manton, followed by an entrée toward recent developments in two-dimensional gravity and intersection theory on the moduli space of Riemann surfaces by Robbert Dijkgraaf and Edward Witten; a study of Majorana fermions and relations to the Braid group by Louis H Kauffman; a pioneering investigation on arithmetic gauge theory by Minhyong Kim; an anecdote-enriched review of singularity theorems in black-hole physics by Sir Roger Penrose; an adventure beyond anyons by Zhenghan Wang; an aperçu on topological insulators from first-principle calculations by Haijun Zhang and Shou-Cheng Zhang; finishing with synopsis on quantum information theory as one of the four revolutions in physics and the second quantum revolution by Xiao-Gang Wen. We hope that this book will serve to inspire the research community.

Genres: Physics, Mathematics

232 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 9, 2019

About the author

Chen Ning Yang, byname Frank Yang is a Chinese theoretical physicist whose research with Tsung-Dao Lee showed that parity—the symmetry between physical phenomena occurring in right-handed and left-handed coordinate systems—is violated when certain elementary particles decay. Until this discovery it had been assumed by physicists that parity symmetry is as universal a law as the conservation of energy or electric charge.

In the year 1957, Yang was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics along with Tsung-Dao Lee "for their penetrating investigation of the so-called parity laws which has led to important discoveries regarding the elementary particles".

Yang’s father, Yang Ko-chuen (also known as Yang Wu-chih), was a professor of mathematics at Tsinghua University, near Peking. While still young, Yang read the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and adopted “Franklin” as his first name. After graduation from the Southwest Associated University, in K’unming, he took his B.Sc. in 1942 and his M.S. in 1944. On a fellowship, he studied in the United States, enrolling at the University of Chicago in 1946. He took his Ph.D. in nuclear physics with Edward Teller and then remained in Chicago for a year as an assistant to Enrico Fermi, the physicist who was probably the most influential in Yang’s scientific development. Lee had also come to Chicago on a fellowship, and the two men began the collaboration that led eventually to their Nobel Prize work on parity. In 1949 Yang went to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and became a professor there in 1955. He became a U.S. citizen in 1964.

Yang is known for, amoung other things:
Landau–Yang theorem
Parity violation
Yang–Mills theory
Yang–Baxter equation
Byers-Yang theorem

Reviews

[Anthony O'Connor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Misleading

This book is simply a collection of advanced research papers and nothing else. It is basically of zero value to the non-specialist.
Some of the abstracts and introductions are interesting. One of the papers is pure waffle.