Relativistic astrophysicist and human-rights advocate Fang Lizhi (Li-Zhi Fang) died at his home in Tucson, Arizona, on 6 April 2012 while planning with one of us (Ruffini) for a July meeting in Stockholm.
Fang was born in Beijing on 12 February 1936, a year and a half before the Japanese invasion. After the war, he entered high school. His math teacher often had him teach the class because Fang had taught himself advanced algebra and geometry. In 1948 the Chinese regime’s brutality against students prompted him to join the underground Communist youth organization. The founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 gave him hope for a new China under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
At age 20 Fang received his physics diploma from Peking University, where he had met classmate Li Shuxian, his future wife. Immediately he was inducted into the CCP and into China’s secret nuclear bomb project. His discussions with Li and friends on the need for free inquiry in education and for political openness, however, led to his expulsion from the CCP and his dismissal from the nuclear project in 1958. He was reassigned to teach at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Beijing, where, although a CCP outcast, he was promoted and retained until 1966. He published 13 papers on topics ranging from Brownian motion to two-photon atomic excitation to nuclear forces.
Many citizens, especially intellectuals, were sent to do hard labor to get them to convert to Maoism. In 1967–71 Fang was sent to a coal mine, where under his mosquito net he studied Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz’s Classical Theory of Fields in Russian. In 1972, after another year of forced labor in a brick factory, he resumed his duties at the USTC, which had relocated to Hefei, and started a group for astrophysics, the area on which he concentrated until his death. In six years he published 28 papers on cosmology and relativistic astrophysics, with an emphasis on neutron stars, SS433, and massive black holes, or quasars—all topics new to China. Fang’s research ran counter to Marxist doctrines on materialism and infinite spacetime. Consequent debates on the philosophy of science reinforced his advocacy for freedom of thought and human dignity. Nevertheless, Fang was reinstated into the CCP and promoted to professor at the USTC in 1978. The gradual opening of China made his world-class work known internationally.
In 1978 Fang was assigned to host Ruffini, a guest of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. They gave joint university lectures and developed a profound friendship. In 1981 in China they published a small book introducing relativistic astrophysics that became revered among astrophysics students. In 1982 Fang and Ruffini organized the first international conference on astrophysics in China—the third Marcel Grossmann Meeting—and thereafter remained organizers of the Grossmann meetings. Together with Abdus Salam, Riccardo Giacconi, George Coyne, and Francis Everitt, they founded the International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics (ICRA) in 1985. That same year Fang’s joint essay with Humitaka Sato won the Gravity Research Foundation’s First Award.
After Fang became vice president of the USTC in 1984, he supported the democratic aspirations of the students and staff. His writings and speeches on science and democracy attracted college students nationwide. In 1986, student rallies for democracy in major cities and Fang’s being elected a district people’s representative with overwhelming votes, in a CCP-controlled election, led to his second expulsion from the CCP and his removal from the USTC. He was, nevertheless, permitted to lead the theoretical astrophysics group at the Beijing Astronomical Observatory.
The CCP’s censures did not silence Fang. In January 1989 he wrote a letter to Deng Xiaoping asking him to release dissident Wei Jingsheng. Shortly after student demonstrations erupted nationwide that spring, the government falsely accused Fang and Li of being the “black hand” behind the growing unrest. The Beijing massacre of 4 June finally drove them to leave China. Early on 6 June, they were invited to the US Embassy as “guests of President Bush.”
Confined in the embassy, Fang used journals supplied by the American Physical Society (APS) and an embassy computer to complete, and later publish, multiple papers, as an affiliate of Beijing Astronomical Observatory, ICRA, and then the University of Cambridge. On 25 June 1990 Fang and Li were permitted to leave China.
Once abroad, Fang received research appointments at the University of Cambridge and at Princeton University. His transient status ended in January 1992 with a tenured position as a physics professor at the University of Arizona. Among his research contributions, he used the properties of quasars and their spectra to study the large-scale structure and topology of the universe. He pioneered the use of the wavelet method and the semianalytical (log–normal) method to study the distribution of dark matter. Through research he raised a new generation of Chinese astrophysicists and cosmologists: 11 PhDs and 7 postdocs. Yet Fang remained unnamed and uncredited when their works were published in China. The prohibition did not deter Fang’s vigorous advocacy for international collaborations in astronomy—including the Beijing-Arizona-Taipei-Connecticut survey project—and in astrophysics and cosmology, mainly through ICRA and ICRANet, which he cofounded in 2005.
As an avid historian of science, Fang had an unexpected insight in 1992 into his 1956 work on the Chinese plutonium pile, when Ruffini showed him Robert Serber’s newly declassified Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb (University of California Press). Fang exploded in laughter when he saw there the same incorrect value for the neutron yield that the Chinese had received from the Soviets. He said the coincidence of the two incorrect values was impossible unless the Soviets had somehow earlier gotten the primer themselves—an early case of nuclear information proliferation!
In exile, Fang continued his human-rights struggle through his writings and his leadership. For example, he chaired the APS Committee on International Freedom of Scientists in 1994. His efforts earned him numerous awards, including the 1996 APS Nicholson Medal for Humanitarian Service.
Since 1961 Fang published at least 360 physics papers, mostly on the frontiers of astrophysics and cosmology, and another 40 on the history or philosophy of science. He wrote many influential essays and authored or edited more than two dozen books. One of his most widely read introductory texts, written with Li, was Creation of the Universe (World Scientific, 1993).
We will miss his powerful presence among us.
