Character from three-body-problem by
Tsinghua physics professor murdered on a struggle-session stage in 1966 for refusing to renounce relativity, the big bang, and the Copenhagen interpretation — the trauma at the bottom of the entire trilogy.
Ye Zhetai will not lie about physics, even to live. The Red Guards offer him a script — denounce Einstein, denounce Schrodinger, denounce his own life's work as bourgeois pseudoscience, and he can come down off the platform. He refuses, calmly, several times. He is a man who taught mechanics, quantum theory, relativity, and the big bang to young people who wanted to know how the world worked, and he cannot imagine standing in front of those same students and saying that none of it is true. His own wife denounces him on the platform. So does his younger daughter. Wenjie, watching from the crowd, cannot reach him. The Red Guard girls beat him to death with their belt buckles in front of everyone. He dies because he was honest, and the moment defines his older daughter for the rest of her life.
A lean, gray-haired academic in a stained Mao-collared shirt that used to be white, glasses knocked askew on the platform. By the time he is dragged out in front of the crowd at the physics building his face is already cut and swollen, his arms forced into the 'jet plane' posture. He keeps his back as straight as the Red Guards will let him.
Also known as: Professor Ye