OpenAI Proved Half of Yang-Mills. The Missing Half Is the One Pauli Would Not Drop.
In the spring of 2019, Yang Chen-Ning, then ninety-six, sat in Tsinghua and told visitors a story from 1954. He and Robert Mills had calculated a result that was “very, very beautiful,” but it contained a wound they could not close. According to their theory, there should exist a particle with charge but no mass. Nature contained no such thing. They agonized over it and decided to publish anyway. Yang gave two reasons. First, the structure was too beautiful to abandon. Second, field theory itself had not yet received a precise mathematical description. It was plagued by divergences, and yet “this did not prevent it from achieving miraculous success in the renormalization program.” Then he added: “Pauli chose not to publish.”
