Steven Weinberg (; May 3, 1933 – July 23, 2021) was an American theoretical physicist. He shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow "for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including, inter alia, the prediction of the weak neutral current". He held the Josey Regental Chair in Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a member of the Physics and Astronomy Departments. His research on elementary particles and physical cosmology was honored with numerous prizes and awards, including the 1991 National Medal of Science. In 2004, he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the American Philosophical Society, with a citation that said he was "considered by many to be the preeminent theoretical physicist alive in the world today." He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Britain's Royal Society, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His three-volume textbook The Quantum Theory of Fields is considered a classic. He later became interested in general relativity and wrote Gravitation and Cosmology. Weinberg's articles on various subjects occasionally appeared in The New York Review of Books and other periodicals. He served as a consultant at the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, president of the Philosophical Society of Texas, and member of the Board of Editors of Daedalus magazine, the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, the JASON group of defense consultants, and many other boards and committees. He wrote popular science, beginning with The First Three Minutes.
Early life Steven Weinberg was born in 1933 in New York City. His parents were Jewish immigrants; his father, Frederick, worked as a court stenographer, while his mother, Eva (née Israel), was a housewife. He found inspiration in popular science, particularly George Gamow and James Jeans. He recalled "seeing in one of their books (I think it was Jeans's The Mysterious Universe) a discussion of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle that mentioned the equation qp-pq=ih/2π. I didn't know what was meant by the right side of the equation, but I knew that if q and p were any sort of number, then q times p would be the same as p times q, so how could qp minus pq be anything but zero? It was evident to me that I needed to learn a good deal before I could master this deep stuff." He graduated from Bronx High School of Science in 1950. In the same graduating class was Sheldon Glashow, whose research, independent of Weinberg's, resulted in their sharing the 1979 Nobel in physics with Abdus Salam. In a posthumously published memoir, Weinberg wrote: "Whatever native intelligence and intellectual curiosity I may have, I owe to my parents, in particular, my father." In 1954, Weinberg received his bachelor's degree from Cornell University, where he majored in physics with a minor in philosophy. There he resided at the Telluride House. He went to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, where he started his graduate studies and research. After a year, Weinberg moved to Princeton University, where he earned his Ph.D. in physics in 1957, completing his dissertation, The Role of Strong Interactions in Decay Processes, under the supervision of Sam Treiman.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
