Fang Lizhi worked in astrophysics at a period when the field was still deciding what counted as an answer.
Fang Lizhi was born at Beijing in 1936. His recorded nationality is People's Republic of China. He was educated at Peking University and University of Science and Technology of China.
Twentieth-century science was collaborative, expensive and political: the questions were pursued by teams, and the answers had consequences that reached well past the laboratory.
The institutions that housed his research were Peking University, University of Arizona and University of Science and Technology of China, where the work centred on astrophysics.
Astrophysics connected the composition of the sky to the physics of the laboratory.
The People's Republic of China setting is not incidental. National academies, funding and language decided which findings travelled and which stayed local, in this period as in ours.
His work was formally recognised with the Freedom Award, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award and Dwight Nicholson Medal for Outreach.
The measure that matters is durability. Results that survive re-examination become the floor of a discipline, and it is on that floor that everything afterwards is built.
A number of his statements have been preserved; they appear below.
Death came in 2012, at 76. By then the contribution had passed into the settled body of astrophysics, where it is used without being credited - the surest sign that it was right.
Achievements
- Held posts at Peking University, University of Arizona and University of Science and Technology of China
- Educated at Peking University and University of Science and Technology of China
- Fields of research: astrophysics
