Chao Chung Ting (Chinese: 丁肇中; pinyin: Dīng Zhàozhōng, born January 27, 1936), also known by his English name Samuel, is a Taiwanese-American particle physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1976 with Burton Richter for discovering the subatomic J/ψ particle. He is the Thomas Dudley Cabot Institute Chair at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Early life and education Ting was born on January 27, 1936, at the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to first generation immigrant parents from Ju County, Shandong, China. His parents, Kuan-hai Ting and Tsun-ying Wong, met and married as graduate students at the University of Michigan. When Ting was born, his parents had just earned their master's degrees from the University of Michigan and his father, a civil engineer, had received a professorship to teach at the China University of Mining and Technology. Ting's parents returned to China two months after his birth. Throughout the Second Sino-Japanese War, Ting was homeschooled by his parents. After the Chinese Civil War, Ting moved to Taiwan with his family in 1949 during the Great Retreat. He would live there as a Taiwanese waishengren from 1949 to 1956 and conducted most of his formal schooling there. His mother taught psychology as a professor at National Taiwan University (NTU). Ting attended and finished middle school in Taiwan. After graduating from Taipei Municipal Chien Kuo High School, he attained a perfect score on the college entrance examinations and entered National Cheng Kung University in September 1955 to study mechanical engineering. As an undergraduate, he completed one semester at the university with high grades in mathematics and science. In 1956, Ting, who barely spoke English, returned to the United States at the age of 20 and won a scholarship to attend the University of Michigan, where a family friend, G. G. Brown (dean of the College of Engineering), invited him to enroll. He studied engineering, mathematics, and physics there, completing his bachelor's degrees, master's degree, and doctorate in only six years. He earned two Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degrees in engineering, mathematics, and physics in 1959, a Master of Science (M.S.) in physics in 1960, and his Ph.D. in physics in 1962. His doctoral studies were funded by a grant by the United States Atomic Energy Commission. As a graduate student at Michigan, Ting befriended Homer Neal, a classmate. One of Ting's doctoral advisors, the physicist Lawrence W. Jones, described him as "very talented academically" and "a young man in a hurry".
Career In 1963, Ting worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). From 1965, he taught at Columbia University in the City of New York and worked at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Germany. Since 1969, Ting has been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Ting received the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in 1976, Nobel Prize in Physics in 1976, Eringen Medal in 1977, DeGaspari Award in Science from the Government of Italy in 1988, Gold Medal for Science from Brescia, Italy in 1988, and the NASA Public Service Medal in 2001.
Nobel Prize
In 1976, Ting was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with Burton Richter of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, for the discovery of the J/ψ meson nuclear particle. They were chosen for the award, in the words of the Nobel committee, "for their pioneering work in the discovery of a heavy elementary particle of a new kind." The discovery was made in 1974 when Ting was heading a research team at MIT exploring new regimes of high energy particle physics. Ting gave his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Mandarin. Although there had been Chinese Nobel Prize recipients before (Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang), none had previously delivered the acceptance speech in Chinese. In his Nobel banquet speech, Ting emphasized the importance of experimental work:
In reality, a theory in natural science cannot be without experimental foundations; physics, in particular, comes from experimental work. I hope that awarding the Nobel Prize to me will awaken the interest of students from the developing nations so that they will realize the importance of experimental work.
Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer
In 1995, not long after the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider project had severely reduced the possibilities for experimental high-energy physics on Earth, Ting proposed the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a space-borne cosmic-ray detector. The proposal was accepted and he became the principal investigator and has been directing the development since then. A prototype, AMS-01, was flown and tested on Space Shuttle mission STS-91 in 1998. The main mission, AMS-02, was then planned for launch by the Shuttle and mounting on the International Space Station. This project is a massive $2 billion undertaking involving 500 scientists from 56 institutions and 16 countries. After the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, NASA announced that the Shuttle was to be retired by 2010 and that AMS-02 was not on the manifest of any of the remaining Shuttle flights. Dr. Ting was forced to (successfully) lobby the United States Congress and the public to secure an additional Shuttle flight dedicated to this project. Also during this time, Ting had to deal with numerous technical problems in fabricating and qualifying the large, extremely sensitive and delicate detector module for space. AMS-02 was successfully launched on Shuttle mission STS-134 on May 16, 2011, and was installed on the International Space Station on May 19, 2011.
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