TinyChan

“Newton realized the force is a function of space, and he knew the function,” Dr. Lee said. “One was elasticity. It’s linear in the distance. And the other one is gravitation. So once the left-hand side is a nonfunction of space and the right-hand side is acceleration, then you can solve it to be right. I thought, ‘That’s interesting.’ But that was not the thing that was stated in the book, so this was my approach.”
In 1943, despite not having a high school diploma, he was admitted to National Chekiang University (now Zhejiang University), which had moved to Guizhou because of the war. Though he started as a student in chemical engineering, he switched to physics when his professors discovered his talent in that field.
The continuing war with Japan forced Dr. Lee in 1945 to switch to National Southwestern Associated University in Kunming, where Dr. Yang, his future collaborator, had also studied. At the university, Ta-You Wu, an influential atomic and nuclear physicist, nominated Dr. Lee for a Chinese government fellowship to study in the United States. By 1946, Dr. Lee, who had completed only two years of college, was at the University of Chicago, having been accepted as a doctoral student.
At the time, the University of Chicago was one of the world’s premier centers for the study of physics. The department was led by Enrico Fermi, the Italian-born physicist who had overseen the first successful nuclear reaction and who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1938. Dr. Lee became Dr. Fermi’s sole doctoral student in theoretical physics, meeting with him every week.
It was an extraordinary learning experience, partly because of Dr. Fermi’s teaching technique, which Dr. Lee explained in the 2007 interview with the Nobel Institute.
“‘You see,’ he said, ‘there are things that I would like to know,’” Dr. Lee recalled Dr. Fermi saying. “‘Lee, why don’t you look up and give me a lecture next week.’”
“I was very happy to teach Fermi,” Dr. Lee added. “Of course, this is an excellent way of building the student’s confidence. And then he would ask me questions and I would have to answer.”