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.
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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.
Career and research
After completing his Ph.D., Weinberg worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University (1957–1959) and University of California, Berkeley (1959) and was promoted to faculty at Berkeley (1960–1966). He did research in a variety of topics of particle physics, such as the high energy behavior of quantum field theory, symmetry breaking, pion scattering, infrared photons and quantum gravity (soft graviton theorem). It was also during this time that he developed the approach to quantum field theory described in the first chapters of his book The Quantum Theory of Fields and started to write his textbook Gravitation and Cosmology, having taken up an interest in general relativity after the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation. He was also appointed the senior scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. The Quantum Theory of Fields spanned three volumes and over 1,500 pages, and is often regarded as the leading book in the field.
In 1966, Weinberg left Berkeley and accepted a lecturer position at Harvard. In 1967 he was a visiting professor at MIT. It was in that year at MIT that Weinberg proposed his model of unification of electromagnetism and nuclear weak forces (such as those involved in beta-decay and kaon-decay), with the masses of the force-carriers of the weak part of the interaction being explained by spontaneous symmetry breaking. One of its fundamental aspects was the prediction of the existence of the Higgs boson. Weinberg's model, now known as the electroweak unification theory, had the same symmetry structure as that proposed by Glashow in 1961: both included the then-unknown weak interaction mechanism between leptons, known as neutral current and mediated by the Z boson. The 1973 experimental discovery of weak neutral currents (mediated by this Z boson) was one verification of the electroweak unification. The paper by Weinberg in which he presented this theory is one of the most cited works ever in high-energy physics.
After his 1967 seminal work on the unification of weak and electromagnetic interactions, Weinberg continued his work in many aspects of particle physics, quantum field theory, gravity, supersymmetry, superstrings and cosmology. In the years after 1967, the full Standard Model of elementary particle theory was developed through the work of many contributors. In it, the weak and electromagnetic interactions already unified by the work of Weinberg, Salam and Glashow, are made consistent with a theory of the strong interactions between quarks, in one overarching theory. In 1973, Weinberg proposed a modification of the Standard Model that did not contain that model's fundamental Higgs boson. Also during the 1970s, he proposed a theory later known as technicolor, in which new strong interactions resolve the hierarchy problem.
Other contributions
Besides his scientific research, Weinberg was a public spokesman for science, testifying before Congress in support of the Superconducting Super Collider, writing articles for The New York Review of Books, and giving various lectures on the larger meaning of science. His first popular science book, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (1977), described the origin of the universe in the Big Bang. Dreams of a Final Theory (1992) made the case for reductionism and the Superconducting Super Collider.
Although still teaching physics, in later years he turned his hand to the history of science, efforts that culminated in To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science (2015). A hostile review in the Wall Street Journal by Steven Shapin attracted a number of commentaries, a response by Weinberg, and an exchange of views between Weinberg and Arthur Silverstein in the NYRB in February 2016.
In 2016, Weinberg became a default leader for faculty and students opposed to a new law allowing the carrying of concealed guns in UT classrooms. He announced that he would prohibit guns in his classes, and said he would stand by his decision to violate university regulations in this matter even if faced with a lawsuit. Weinberg never retired and taught at UT until his death.
Ian McEwan included Dreams of a Final Theory in his canon of science writing: "With a fine sense of literary tradition, the physicist Steven Weinberg, in his book Dreams of a Final Theory, revisited Huxley's lecture on chalk in order to make the case for reductionism." Weinberg recalled "I found myself so often defending the reductionist aims of high energy physics that I wrote a book about it, Dreams of a Final Theory. Alas, funding for the Super Collider was cancelled in 1993, but even though I grieve that we physicists had failed to convince Congress, I'm at least proud that my book made it into McEwan's canon."
Personal life and archive
In 1954 Weinberg married legal scholar Louise Goldwasser and they had a daughter, Elizabeth.
Weinberg died on July 23, 2021, at age 88 at a hospital in Austin, where he had been undergoing treatment for several weeks.
Weinberg's papers were donated to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.
Worldview
Weinberg identified as a liberal.
Views on religion
Weinberg was an atheist. Before he was an advocate of the Big Bang theory, Weinberg said: "The steady-state theory is philosophically the most attractive theory because it least resembles the account given in Genesis."
Views on Israel
Weinberg was known for his support of Israel, which he characterized as "the 'most exposed salient' in a war between liberal democracies and Muslim theocracies." He wrote the 1997 essay "Zionism and Its Adversaries" on the issue.
In the 2000s, Weinberg canceled trips to universities in the United Kingdom because of the British boycotts of Israel. At the time, he said: "Given the history of the attacks on Israel and the oppressiveness and aggressiveness of other countries in the Middle East and elsewhere, boycotting Israel indicated a moral blindness for which it is hard to find any explanation other than antisemitism."
Honors and awards
Honorary Doctor of Science degrees from eleven institutions: University of Chicago, Knox College, University of Rochester, Yale University, City University of New York, Dartmouth College, Weizmann Institute, Clark University, Washington College, Columbia University, Bates College.
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, elected 1968
Fellow of the American Physical Society, elected 1971
National Academy of Sciences, elected 1972
J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize, 1973
Richtmyer Memorial Award (1974)
Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, 1977
Steel Foundation Science Writing Award, 1977, for writing The First Three Minutes
Elliott Cresson Medal (Franklin Institute), 1979
Nobel Prize in Physics, 1979
Elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1981
Elected to American Philosophical Society (1982)
James Madison Medal of Princeton University, 1991
National Medal of Science, 1991
President of the Philosophical Society of Texas, 1992
Emperor Has No Clothes Award by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, 1999
Selected publications
A list of Weinberg's publications can be found on arXiv and Scopus.
Full list of publications and scientific literature content can be found on inspire-hep and NASA ADS
https://inspirehep.net/authors/983868
INSPIRE ID: INSPIRE-00135339
Bibliography: textbooks
Gravitation and Cosmology: Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity (1972)
The Quantum Theory of Fields (three volumes: I Foundations 1995, II Modern Applications 1996, III Supersymmetry 2000, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-67053-5, ISBN 0-521-67054-3, ISBN 0-521-66000-9)
Cosmology (2008, OUP)
Lectures on Quantum Mechanics (2012, second edition 2015, CUP)
Lectures on Astrophysics (2019, CUP, ISBN 978-1-108-41507-1)
Foundations of Modern Physics (2021, CUP, ISBN 978-1-108-84176-4)
Bibliography: popular science
The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (1977, updated with new afterword in 1993, ISBN 0-465-02437-8)
The Discovery of Subatomic Particles (1983)
Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics: The 1986 Dirac Memorial Lectures (1987; with Richard Feynman)
Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (1993), ISBN 0-09-922391-0
To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science (2015), Harper/HarperCollins Publishers, ISBN 978-0-06-234665-0
Steven Weinberg: A Life in Physics (2024), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9781009513487
Bibliography: collected essays
Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries (2001, 2003, HUP)
Glory and Terror: The Coming Nuclear Danger (2004, NYRB)
Lake Views: This World and the Universe (2010), Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-03515-1.
Third Thoughts (2018), Belknap Press, ISBN 978-0-674-97532-3
Scholarly articles
Weinberg, Steven (November 20, 1967). "A Model of Leptons". Physical Review Letters. 19 (21). American Physical Society (APS): 1264–1266. Bibcode:1967PhRvL..19.1264W. doi:10.1103/physrevlett.19.1264. ISSN 0031-9007.
Feinberg, G.; Weinberg, S. (April 1, 1961). "Law of Conservation of Muons". Physical Review Letters. 6 (7). American Physical Society (APS): 381–383. Bibcode:1961PhRvL...6..381F. doi:10.1103/physrevlett.6.381. ISSN 0031-9007.
Pais, Abraham; Weinberg, Steven; Quigg, Chris; Riordan, Michael; Panofsky, Wolfgang K.H.; Trimble, Virginia (April 1, 1997). 100 years of elementary particles [Beam Line, vol. 27, issue 1, Spring 1997] (Report). Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI). doi:10.2172/790903.
Weinberg, S (2010). "Pions in Large N Quantum Chromodynamics". Phys. Rev. Lett. 105 (26) 261601. arXiv:1009.1537. Bibcode:2010PhRvL.105z1601W. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.261601. PMID 21231642. S2CID 46210811.
Weinberg, S (2012). "Collapse of the State Vector". Phys. Rev. A. 85 (6) 062116. arXiv:1109.6462. Bibcode:2012PhRvA..85f2116W. doi:10.1103/physreva.85.062116. S2CID 119273840.
Popular articles
A Designer Universe?, a refutation of attacks on the theories of evolution and cosmology, e.g., those conducted under the rubric of intelligent design, is based on a talk given in April 1999 at the Conference on Cosmic Design of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. This and other works express Weinberg's strongly held position that scientists should be less passive in defending science against anti-science religiosity.
Beautiful Theories, an article reprinted from Dreams of a Final Theory by Steven Weinberg in 1992 which focuses on the nature of beauty in physical theories.
The Crisis of Big Science, The New York Review of Books, May 10, 2012. Weinberg places the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider in the context of a bigger national and global socio-economic crisis, including a general crisis in funding for science research and the provision of adequate education, healthcare, transportation, and communication infrastructure, and criminal justice and law enforcement.