A Nobel prize-winning groom gets a joyous lift

An 82-year-old Nobel Prize-winning physicist married a 28-year-old Chinese graduate student in a civil ceremony yesterday, the official China News Service reported.

Yang Chen Ning (楊振寧), also a member of Taiwan's Academia Sinica, wed Weng Fan (翁帆) at the Civil Affairs Bureau in the southern city of Shantou, in Guangdong province, where the bride is from, CNS said.

They married in the foreign marriage registration division, where the parents of the bride witnessed the ceremony, the agency said. The report did not give any other details, saying that the couple ``kindly refused reporters' requests for interviews.''

Chinese-born Yang shared the 1957 Nobel prize for physics with colleague Lee Tsung-dao (李政道).

Yang became a US citizen in 1964 and held professorships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Yang spent most of his career in the US before returning to China last year following the death of his first wife. Weng is a student in international trade at Guangdong University.

In an e-mail to friends announcing his marriage plans, Yang reportedly wrote a poem in English about Weng.

It read, in part: ``Oh, sweet angel, truthfully you are/ God's benevolent last gift/ To give my old soul/ A joyous rejuvenating lift.''