Fang Lizhi - Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology

Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology

In 1972, the Cultural Revolution calmed down a bit, and scientific research resumed. Fang found an opportunity to read some recent astrophysics papers in western journals, and soon wrote his first paper on cosmology, "A Cosmological Solution in Scalar-tensor Theory with Mass and Blackbody Radiation", which was published on the journal Wu Li (Physics), Vol. 1, 163 (1972). This is also the first modern cosmological research paper in mainland China. Fang assembled a group of young faculty members of USTC around him to conduct astrophysics research.

At the time, conducting researches on relativity theory and cosmology in China was very risky politically, because these theories were considered to be "idealistic" theories in contradiction with the dialectical materialism theory, which is the official philosophy of the Communist Party. According to the dialectical materialism philosophy, both time and space must be infinite, while the Big Bang theory allows the possibility of the finiteness of space and time. During the Culture Revolution, campaigns were waged against Einstein and the Theory of Relativity in Beijing and Shanghai. Once Fang published his theory, some of the critics of the Theory of Relativity, especially a group based in Shanghai, prepared to attack Fang politically. However, by this time the "leftist" line was declining in the Chinese academia. Professor Dai Wensai, the most well-known Chinese astronomer at the time and chair of the Astronomy Department of Nanjing University, also supported Fang. Many of the members of the "Theory of Relativity Criticism Group" changed to study the theory and conduct research in it. Subsequently Fang was regarded as the father of cosmological research in China. Nevertheless, in the 1980s and even as late as the 1990s, articles criticizing the Big Bang theory as "pseudo-science from the west ... in violation of the principles of Marxism philosophy", and "politically incorrect" still appeared frequently in newspapers and magazines in paper.

Fang published a large number of papers on astrophysics and cosmology. In the late 1970s, he and his group used the luminosity of selected radio quasars to measure the Hubble diagram, and with data available at the time, suggested that the universe may be closed (Fang et al., Acta Astronomica Sinica 17, 134 (1977)). This work was noticed by researchers outside China; a Nature article noted that it obtained similar results but appeared earlier than the paper by Davidsen et al., Nature 269, 203 (1977). Fang also carried out research on topics including neutron stars, black holes, inflation and quantum cosmology. He soon gained international recognition, and as China began to open up in the late 1970s, he was invited to international conferences outside the country. In 1985, together with H. Sato of Kyoto University, Japan, Fang won the first prize of the Gravity Research Foundation essay competition by proposing that the periodic distribution of quasars observed can be explained if the Universe is multiply-connected, i.e. has a non-trivial topology.

He was elected as the youngest member of the Chinese Academy of Science in 1980. His membership was, however, revoked after the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989. He helped promote international academic exchange in China. Together with Remo Ruffini, he organized the first major international scientific conference in China: the 3rd Marcel Grossmann meeting in 1982. During this meeting, Tsvi Piran and T.G. Horowitz became the first two Israeli scientists to enter the People's Republic of China; at the time, there were no diplomatic relations between China and Israel. He invited Stephen Hawking to visit China in 1985, and organized the International Astronomical Union conference IAU-124 on "Observational Cosmology" in Beijing in 1986.

Fang also trained many young colleagues and students in the field of astrophysics and cosmology; Fang was considered an excellent teacher. Fang and Li coauthored "Introduction to Mechanics", an introductory book on Newtonian mechanics and special theory of relativity. Fang was also the first scientist in China to write popular accounts of contemporary developments, such as cosmology and black holes. Fang's book, Creation of the Universe (yuzhou de chuangsheng in Chinese) which was published in 1987, introduced basic cosmological ideas, and influenced a large number of physics and astronomy students growing up in the 1980s in China.