Character from remembrance-of-earths-past by
Theoretical physicist, Yang Dong's lover, the man who plays pool with Wang Miao while explaining the death of physics, and who later climbs aboard a fragile bubble of plasma to make first contact with a Droplet — moments before the Droplet kills him and a thousand warships.
Ding Yi is the kind of physicist who treats a billiards table as a metaphor and a metaphor as a load-bearing wall. He is funny in a black, exhausted way — he tells Wang Miao that physics is dead with the same tone other men use to confirm a lunch reservation. He is grieving Yang Dong throughout the trilogy and never says her name without pausing first. He is the volunteer who steps onto the deck of a fragile experimental craft to greet the Droplet because he believes meaningful contact is owed even to one's executioner. He dies in a single second of incomprehension, holding the railing.
Slight and intense, in his early forties when first met, with a ragged ponytail and the chronic squint of someone who reads too much in too little light. He wears soft worn cardigans and corduroys and is almost never without a cigarette burning between two fingers. There is a permanent furrow between his eyebrows that does not relax even in conversation.
Also known as: Dr. Ding, 丁仪