Lee and Wang, "Question of Parity Conservation in Weak Interactions". American Physical Society, 1956. Physical Review 104 (1) October 1, 1956 Original printed wrappers. Fine condition. We offer the entire weekly issue in its (SCARCE) original wrappers.
T. D. Lee Columbia University, New York, New York & C. N. Yang Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York: "Question of Parity Conservation in Weak Interactions". Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee were awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for their work "for their penetrating investigation of the so-called parity laws which has led to important discoveries regarding the elementary particles". The work of Yang and Lee came to destroy the "law of conservation of parity," which had been assumed to be a fundamental law of nature; it predicted that beta particles, which are emitted by a radioactive nucleus, would fly off in any direction, regardless of the spin of the nucleus. In 1957 ("Experimental Test of Parity Conservation in Beta Decay" pr, 4 Feb 1957), using atoms of cobalt-60, W.S. Wu (et alia) showed that beta particles were more likely to be emitted in a particular direction that depended on the spin of the cobalt nuclei. Broken parity (symmetry) essentially means that something virtual (shadowy, but real in a special sense and widely used in physics; it has real physical consequences, since it creates all the forces of nature) has become observable (real in the ordinary everyday sense that it can be detected, measured, observed, and used. "Until 1956 the overwhelming majority of physicist believed that parity conservation is never violated in nature. Any new theory without evidence that went against this ingrained belief would almost certainly be dismissed. The belief in parity conservation was too strong an accepted paradigm to be challenged. Then in 1956 two Chinese physicists Yang and Lee first pointed out the exception and theoretically predicted non-conservation of parity. Initially there was predictable skepticism and it took further convincing work and subsequent experimental verification by a Chinese woman Wu and her colleagues and in 1957 the physicist community abandoned a long held belief in conservation of parity. Yang and Lee were not only vindicated, they received the Nobel Prize in Physics for this intellectual feat." $1,450.
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