by Fang Lizhi
Provisional Party Committee of the Communist Party of China for the Institute of High-Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
23 February 1979
* * *
Just like that, I was a Communist Party member again, and moreover a senior member with twenty-four years of membership credit. It didn’t count that I had been outside the Party for twenty-one of those twenty-four years, and it didn’t matter that not a trace was left of the Communist idealism that had originally brought me into the Party. It had taken the Party twenty-one years, the time of nearly one human generation, to reach the conclusion that “offering one’s own opinions on the direction and policies of the Party and the government” is permissible. How arduous were China’s steps toward modernization going to be?
In the summer of 1978, I was invited to attend the Ninth Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics, which was to be held in Munich, West Germany. This was my first invitation abroad. Chinese regulations, which had been in place for thirty years, were that any Chinese citizen traveling abroad for a work-related purpose, no matter how important or trivial, could not depart without approval from the country’s premier. So my invitation to Bonn needed review and a decision at the highest level. In November, the good news arrived. Premier Hua Guofeng had approved. How many of my colleagues in astrophysics around the world enjoy the benefit of such high-level solicitude?
By chance, China’s own First Conference on Relativistic Astrophysics was taking place in Guangzhou on the eve of my departure for Bonn. I went to Guangzhou and gave a presentation on the cosmology of the early universe. On November 23, the day of the midconference break, a group of us boarded a minelayer of the Chinese navy’s Southern Fleet and toured the Pearl River Delta. The area has no scenery to speak of, but plenty of history. It was where, in 1839, the Opium War broke out. British gunboats defeated Qing soldiers and the dynasty was forced to sue for peace, surrendering sovereignty and accepting disgrace. From then on people throughout the country (not just a few intellectuals, as in the late Ming Dynasty) began to see China’s backwardness, to let go of the myth that they were inhabitants of an unmatched celestial empire, and to accept that modernization was needed. The Pearl River Delta can be seen as the site from which modern China originated.
We went to Huangpu harbor to board the naval vessel. The small ship’s first stop was Tiger Gate Fortress, which guards the Pearl River inlet and is where the British military knocked China’s door open. The second stop was Taiping township, where Lin Zexu, a Qing high commissioner, destroyed British opium in an attempt to end its sale and spread. The lime pit that he used for this purpose was still on display. After lunch we went to the Shajiao Fortress, where we saw a huge, mind-boggling Chinese cannon. Its shaft had an external diameter of about 2.3 feet and it was about sixteen feet long. The guides said that this great gun, after arriving in place and shooting one cannonball, went “blind,” as they put it. Its bore somehow got clogged and now it was used only for display.
The Opium War caused some Chinese to conclude, If we can just chase the British and the other foreigners out of China, we can revert to being the great celestial empire that we once were. In essence, this is the pattern the Chinese Communists observed. True, they held Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin—foreigners all—in the highest regard; from the point of view of Chinese nativists like the Boxers, they “ate Western food.” But when they took power in 1949, they were extremely thorough about chasing out foreigners and cutting off normal ties between foreigners and Chinese.
Here is a very small example of how effective that cutoff was: In 1977, even with the Cultural Revolution over, postal workers in the largest post office in downtown Hefei didn’t know how to send a letter outside the country. People who asked about doing such a thing were met with stares of startled disbelief. It was as if the post office were using maps from the Great Ming. Foreign countries? What?
By the time we took our delta tour, the original mission of that great but ill-fated cannon had long been accomplished. The ship we had boarded was a Chinese military vessel; Chinese were in charge at the mouth of the Pearl River; British warships had long ago retreated to Hong Kong. But while that useless cannon rested on its haunches, the modernization that was supposed to flow in automatically if only we could chase out the foreigners—didn’t happen. This truth seemed now to be dawning on certain people. Having sealed China off, they now favored “opening.” Good. Meanwhile, though, we had paid the price of a near thirty-year delay.
In October 1977, the American Astronomical Society sent ten astronomers to China. This was the society’s first official visit ever. Soon, more and more Western astronomers were coming, and the applications of Chinese scientists to go abroad were also more easily approved. The long-standing barriers were gradually falling. I found it interesting that when Chinese and Western colleagues met, it didn’t seem to matter that they had been separated for so long, did not know each other personally, and had been through some very different life experiences. They just dived straight into professional talk. There were sometimes a few language difficulties, but no other barriers. Except as locators for items in the heavens, words like “Eastern” and “Western” were useless. This was further evidence that astronomy transcends cultures. Its vision is universal.
How could it be, I thought, that modernization is not also universal? The keys to modernization are neither Chinese nor foreign, neither Eastern nor Western. They are the ability to absorb advances—advances called science and democracy—that are available to anyone, anywhere. That, in a nutshell, is it.
Otherwise, a useless cannon will forever be a useless cannon.
I returned to Beijing on November 27 for a few busy days and a hurried visit with my family, then headed for Bonn.
14. STEPPING OUT OF CHINA
On December 6, 1978, at age forty-two, I stepped outside China for the first time. I was accompanied by two colleagues from the Beijing Observatory on a flight to West Germany, and we arrived in Bonn the next day.1 December 7 was, by chance, the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Bonn, and our hosts were in high spirits. After an evening reception, they took us to see a special little library that contained some original works by Johannes Kepler.
I was aware that Kepler had drawn on concepts of musical harmony to explain patterns of planetary motion, but I had never seen any of his original manuscripts. I was surprised to learn that some of them were actually written on musical scores—and moreover without words, only in musical notation. Kepler saw the solar system as a system in “harmony” and used intervals and rhythms to describe the speeds and reversal of directions of planetary movement, rather as one might describe a movement in music. In his own words:
The heavenly bodies are nothing but a continuous song for several voices, perceptible to the intellect, not the ear; a figured music that seems to use cadences and a fixed, predesigned six-part chord to set landmarks in the immeasurable flow of time.
One thing Kepler’s musical scores helped me to understand was that in order to perceive the earth’s orbit clearly, one’s perspective had to be from outside the solar system.
When I got back to Zum Treppehen, the hotel where we were staying, Kepler’s solar system music was still ringing in my ears. But now it had a new variation: in order to perceive China clearly, one needed a perspective from outside China.
After that trip to Germany, I made several more short-term visits to institutes of physics or astrophysics in other countries. By the summer of 1980, I had been, in this order, to West Germany, Italy, France, Romania, Switzerland, England, Ireland, the United States, and Pakistan. China was just opening up after being cut off for four decades, and Chinese people were largely unfamiliar with the rest of the world. The rest of the world was, if anything, even less familiar with Chinese people. I got used to being the first person from China anyone had seen in forty years: An authentic Chinese, and he’s a physicist!
&
nbsp; In the spring of 1979, I visited Palermo, the capital of Sicily. On the night I arrived, the local radio station broadcast that “today the first professor from China has arrived in Sicily.” It did not try to say “counting from when?” though. It was certainly true that there hadn’t been many Chinese people in Sicily for quite some time. I couldn’t argue with that. Perhaps we can say this: I was likely the first Chinese physicist to visit Sicily since the time of Carthage.
It was the same in other Italian cities. Every time I arrived at a new place, a clutch of reporters was waiting for me and I had to take questions. The questions were almost always on the same topics: Marco Polo and spaghetti. It was as if no Chinese had been to Italy since Marco Polo returned in 1295. It also seemed that other than to address the question of which came first, Chinese noodles or Italian spaghetti, there was no particular reason why Italians should think about China.
Around Easter of that year, I went to Monaco. I wanted to see what Monte Carlo looked like. I don’t mean the gambling—I didn’t have any money for that in any case. I was just curious, I guess—maybe because the computational algorithms known as the “Monte Carlo methods” were becoming more and more important for physics in those days. Anyway, when I crossed the border, the immigration officer picked up my passport and peered at it first this way, then that, as if loath to lay it down, rather like a philatelist enthralled by a rare stamp. He said it was the first time he had seen a passport from the People’s Republic of China and he wasn’t sure where he was supposed to apply his stamp. In the end he decided not to stamp the thing anywhere and just let me in. I had the impression that a Chinese citizen was a rarer sight than a Chinese panda.
Oddity though I was, I never felt isolated, because my hosts were always physicists or astrophysicists. Physics is the same everywhere, and this makes it easy for physicists to get onto the same wavelength. For example, I was not personally acquainted with Professor Remo Ruffini of the University of Rome before he invited me to visit him. Then we discovered that, without the other knowing it, we had published papers on a similar topic—in fact had done this three times! Our conclusions were similar, too. Physics has had its own community ever since Galileo and Newton founded the field. Some people have even called it a kind of worldwide “religion,” with Einstein as pope.
March 14, 1979, was the hundredth anniversary of Einstein’s birth. For more than a year before and after that date, there were a variety of events honoring the memory of this great man. When I got to Rome, just before the anniversary, Einstein shows were on television every day. I stayed at the Lincean Academy, one of the centers of the commemorative events, and reporters from Italian National Television Station Two came there to interview me.
“What’s the relation between Einstein and China?”
China again. And it was a challenging question. Einstein actually had very little direct contact with China. He spent only two days of his life there, in 1921, when a ship that he was taking from Japan to Germany docked for two days in Shanghai. There was no way his China experience could yield the big scoop these reporters were digging for.
I could, of course, have said, “Einstein was denounced during the Cultural Revolution.” That would, in its own way, have been a scoop. But wouldn’t it be just too embarrassing for China, with its worldwide reputation for honoring teachers and following the Way, to reveal that a supremely respected scientist had been denounced? I could have taken another tack and said, “I have a good friend who compiled three big volumes of The Collected Works of Einstein while farming.” But I was afraid that that would cause the Italians to wonder if I knew the first thing about relativity theory. Their next question might well be, “And the use of relativity theory in farming is…?”
I was lucky to have been studying superdense stars at that time. This allowed me to risk the following answer: “Twentieth-century Einstein has a connection with eleventh-century China.” I said this because one of the important pieces of corroboration for the prediction of the existence of superdense stars—neutron stars—in Einstein’s relativity theory has been the observation by Song Dynasty court astronomers in 1054 of a supernova explosion. But even as I gave my answer, I feared privately that it might seem a bit far-fetched to the TV journalists. I hardly imagined that it would be a big hit with them—but they were delighted! This might have been because my answer spanned ancient and modern as well as East and West. And it might have appealed particularly to Italians, because of their love of antiquity.
That special regard for antiquity struck me in another experience. On a trip to Venice in 1983, I noticed an exhibition entitled “Seven Thousand Years of Chinese Civilization.” In elementary school in China, we had been taught that China is a “five-thousand-year-old ancient land.” So how did that get bumped up to seven thousand in Italy? I guess the organizers of the exhibit needed to attract visitors, so they tacked on another two thousand. If my comment about Einstein and the eleventh century was far-fetched, this was worse.
Far-fetched associations happen a lot when great people are being commemorated, because most people like to highlight their own slice of life and display their own special regard for the great person, perhaps as a way to share a bit in the glory. Science itself, though, is built on an opposite principle. It is a global project that has no national or geographic borders. Instead of spotlighting localities, it brings people from different cultures and places together, making ties across cultures not far-fetched at all but very real. Einstein in particular pursued projects globally, made discoveries that were universal, and called himself a “citizen of the world.” So when I mentioned Song Dynasty observations as contributions to the discovery of neutron stars in order to show how a field inaugurated by Einstein was global, I was not really out of bounds.
Later I was inspired to compile a list of the major events that went into the discovery of neutron stars so that I could use it whenever I needed to show that science is global. Here it is:
• The general relativity of Albert Einstein is established (1915)
• The statistics of Enrico Fermi and Paul Dirac are established (1927)
• James Chadwick discovers neutrons (1933)
• Lev Landau predicts the possibility of neutron stars (1933)
• Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky conjecture that neutron stars result from the explosion of supernovae (1934)
• Robert Oppenheimer theorizes that neutron stars are formed from gravitational collapse of larger stars (1939)
• Antony Hewish and Jocelyn Bell discover radio pulsars (1967)
• Historical records from 1054 to 1056 in China, Japan, and Korea support the hypothesis that pulsars are neutron stars
Plainly, our understanding of neutron stars has international origins.
In April 1979, Italian National Television Station Two asked me to go before the cameras again. They were doing a series to probe more deeply into Einstein’s work and were including a section on the origins of his concept of relativity. It is widely accepted that the following passage from Galileo has had crucial importance in the development of relativity theory:
Shut yourself up with some friend in the main cabin below decks on some large ship, and have with you there some flies, butterflies, and other small flying insects. Have a large bowl of water with some fish in it; hang up a bottle that empties drop by drop into a wide vessel beneath it.
With the ship standing still, observe carefully how the insects fly with equal speed to all sides of the cabin. The fish swim indifferently in all directions; the drops fall into the vessel beneath; and, in throwing something to your friend, you need throw it no more strongly in one direction than another, the distances being equal; jumping with your feet together, you pass equal spaces in every direction.
When you have observed all these things carefully, have the ship proceed at any speed you like, so long as the speed is constant. You will discover not the least change in all the effects named, nor could you tell from any of them whether the s
hip was moving or standing still. In jumping, you will move across the floor the same distances as before, and you will not make larger jumps toward the stern than toward the prow even if the ship is moving very rapidly.2
The Station Two people had arranged for someone to read this famous passage in the city of Pisa, where the Arno River flows into the sea. They chose the site because Galileo lived many years in Pisa, and he was imprisoned there as well. It is quite possible that the discovery quoted above was made on the Arno River.
The program director had heard me say, in a talk at the Lincean Academy, that Galileo’s discovery about relativity may not have been the first of its kind. A passage in The Book of Documents: Kaolingyao section from the Han period in China (206 B.C.–A.D. 220) says:
The earth moves at constant speed but people are unaware. It is as if people are in a ship with the windows closed; the ship moves and people do not notice.
The insight is quite the same as Galileo’s, but it came more than a thousand years earlier. The Italian TV director, showing not the slightest bias, changed his script right after he heard my talk and included that line from The Book of Documents. Moreover, he asked me to be a temporary actor—to go to Pisa, stand in front of the Tower of Pisa, and pronounce the line zhou xing er ren bu jue ye—“the ship moves and people do not notice.”