Tsung-Dao Lee, Nobel-winning physicist, Brookhaven Lab researcher, dies at 97

Tsung-Dao "T.D." Lee was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, a visionary whose ideas have been instrumental in the research conducted at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, and a Renaissance man who sculpted and painted, say those who knew him.

"He could cross scientific disciplines and he could cross science and the humanities," Robert P. Crease, a professor in Stony Brook University's Department of Philosophy, said in an interview. Crease has written extensively about the history of Brookhaven Lab, which is managed for the Department of Energy by a partnership between Battelle and the Research Foundation for the State University of New York on behalf of Stony Brook University. Crease said sculptures that Lee designed appear all over the world.

"And he was a warm and witty person. He was an amazing person. He was also a mentor to many people, many excellent physicists," Crease said of Lee, who died Aug. 4 in San Francisco. He was 97.

Hong Ma, who chairs Brookhaven Lab's Physics Department, said he had "benefited from his [Lee's] interaction with the Chinese physics community in the late '70s and early '80s. At that time China was rather closed. But he had the vision to bridge the gap between the United States and China and established a program that enabled U.S. universities to include the students in China. I was one of them."

Ma added that Lee, who at the time was a professor at Columbia University, had "a very big influence on what we do here" at Brookhaven Lab. "First of all, he made a big impact on the physics we’re working on. Specifically, he is one of those people who really pushed for the new collider that we have — the [Relativistic] Heavy Ion Collider  — that was built in the '90s and is still operating. The physics of what we do now was influenced by his vision decades ago," Ma said. '

Crease wrote in an online obituary in the journal Nature on Thursday that "Lee was influential in the evolution of the Brookhaven lab when it faced an uncertain future after a huge high-energy accelerator project was cancelled in 1983. He helped the lab to transform that project into another, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), which would study the nature of nuclear matter. Lee then established and was first director of the RIKEN BNL Research Center, a pioneering collaboration between Japanese and U.S. scientists at the RHIC."

Nick Samios, a former director of the lab from 1982 to 1997, called Lee a "mentor." Samios, of South Setauket, said, "I’ve known him since 1956 at Columbia. I was a graduate student and I got my degree in ’57."

Samios said Lee was director of the RIKEN BNL Research Center from 1997 to 2003, "and I succeeded him."

Samios called Lee a "noted theoretical physicist. Beyond that, he was an excellent administrator." Lee, he said, "also was very influential in bringing Chinese scientists to the U.S. for study. He was on many national and international committees in the U.S. and China and elsewhere. So he was a world figure in science."

Samios called Lee a "Renaissance man. He did paintings. He did sketches. He sent Christmas cards that he painted. He did calligraphy."

A remembrance on Brookhaven Lab's website by its spokesman, Joe Gettler, said Lee shared the Nobel Prize for physics  in 1957 — at age 30, one of the youngest scientists to receive the prize — with C.N. Yang for discoveries they made during a summer program at the lab a year earlier. Gettler said the pair won the prize "for a theoretical discovery that radically questioned one of physics' basic tenets." 

The pair discovered a "parity violation" concerning two particles, which upended previously "sacrosanct" laws in physics about symmetry. It was later proved in experiments by another researcher, Samios said. 

Crease wrote in the Nature obituary that Lee’s "education in Shanghai had been interrupted by the 1937 Japanese invasion of China." By 1945, Crease wrote, Lee studied physics at the National Southwestern Associated University in Kunming, China. At age 19, he received "a fellowship from the Chinese government to study in the United States, where he completed a PhD at the University of Chicago, Illinois, with the Italian American nuclear physicist and Nobel prizewinner Enrico Fermi as his adviser. He spent the rest of his career at Columbia University."

By Olivia Winslow

olivia.winslow@newsday.com@newsollie