The Physicist Who Broke Nature's Mirror

Chen Ning Yang transformed twentieth-century physics through two foundational breakthroughs. Born in Hefei in 1922, he studied in wartime China before earning his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1948. With Tsung-Dao Lee, he challenged parity conservation in weak interactions, inspiring experiments that confirmed nature distinguishes left from right. He shared the 1957 Nobel Prize and later shaped particle physics through Yang-Mills gauge theory. This documentary follows a career that redefined symmetry.

Parity violation destroyed a principle physicists had assumed was universal, proving that even basic ideas about mirror symmetry must be tested. Yang-Mills theory went further, supplying the gauge framework from which the Standard Model describes fundamental forces and particles. Yang's work therefore changed both experimental expectations and the mathematical language of physics. This documentary connects one startling broken symmetry with the deeper structure underlying modern quantum field theory.