Character from remembrance-of-earths-past by
Daughter of Ye Wenjie, brilliant superstring physicist, lover of Ding Yi — the woman who killed herself when she realized that physics had never existed, leaving the suicide note that opens the trilogy's central mystery.
Yang Dong was the kind of theoretical physicist for whom a wrong answer was a personal grief. She lived inside her equations the way some women live inside their families. When the sophon-corrupted accelerator results began to make a coherent worldview impossible, she did not panic, did not call a press conference, did not even tell her mother — she sat at her desk, wrote a note that read 'physics has never existed and will never exist', and ended herself. Ding Yi never recovered. Ye Wenjie kept the note in her coat pocket for years.
A delicate woman in her early thirties with long straight black hair, a high pale forehead, and a way of holding her head as if listening to something a few seconds in the future. She wore plain dark clothes — turtlenecks, slim trousers — and almost never any jewelry. There are very few photographs of her smiling.
Also known as: Dong, 杨冬