Steven Weinberg is an American
theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate
in Physics for his contributions with
Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the
unification of the weak force and
electromagnetic interaction between
elementary particles.
He holds the Josey Regental Chair in
Science at the University of Texas at
Austin, where he is a member of the
Physics and Astronomy Departments. His
research on elementary particles and
cosmology has been honored with numerous
prizes and awards, including in 1979 the
Nobel Prize in Physics and in 1991 the
National Medal of Science. In 2004 he
received the Benjamin Franklin Medal of
the American Philosophical Society, with
a citation that said he is "considered
by many to be the preeminent theoretical
physicist alive in the world today." He
has been elected to the US National
Academy of Sciences and Britain's Royal
Society, as well as to the American
Philosophical Society and the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Weinberg's articles on various subjects
occasionally appear in The New York
Review of Books and other periodicals.
He has served as 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.
Biography
Steven Weinberg was born in 1933 in New
York City, his parents were Jewish
immigrants. He graduated from Bronx High
School of Science in 1950. He was in the
same graduating class as Sheldon
Glashow, whose own research, independent
of Weinberg's, would result in them
sharing the same 1979 Nobel in Physics.
Weinberg received his bachelor's degree
from Cornell University in 1954, living
at the Cornell branch of the Telluride
Association. He left Cornell and went to
the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen
where he started his graduate studies
and research. After one year, Weinberg
returned to Princeton University where
he earned his PhD degree in physics in
1957, studying under Sam Treiman.
Weinberg is an atheist.
Academic career
After completing his PhD, Weinberg
worked as a post-doctoral researcher at
Columbia University and University of
California, Berkeley and then he was
promoted to faculty at Berkeley. 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. It
was also during this time that he
developed the approach to quantum field
theory that is described in the first
chapters of his book The Quantum Theory
of Fields and started to write his
textbook Gravitation and Cosmology. Both
textbooks, perhaps especially the
second, are among the most influential
texts in the scientific community in
their subjects.
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 of
nuclear weak forces, 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: hence both
models 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 was
one verification of the electroweak
unification. The paper by Weinberg in
which he presented this theory was one
of the most cited theoretical works ever
in high energy physics as of 2009.
After his 1967 seminal work on the
unification of weak and electromagnetic
interactions, Steven Weinberg continued
his work in many aspects of particle
physics, quantum field theory, gravity,
supersymmetry, superstrings and
cosmology, as well as a theory called
Technicolor.
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, Abdus
Salam and Sheldon 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 which did not contain that model's
fundamental Higgs boson.
Weinberg became Higgins Professor of
Physics at Harvard University in 1973.
In 1979 he pioneered the modern view on
the renormalization aspect of quantum
field theory that considers all quantum
field theories as effective field
theories and changed the viewpoint of
previous work that a sensible quantum
field theory must be renormalizable.
This approach allowed the development of
effective theory of quantum gravity, low
energy QCD, heavy quark effective field
theory and other developments, and it is
a topic of considerable interest in
current research.
In 1979, some six years after the
experimental discovery of the neutral
currents – i.e. the discovery of the
inferred existence of the Z boson – but
following the 1978 experimental
discovery of the theory's predicted
amount of parity violation due to Z
bosons' mixing with electromagnetic
interactions, Weinberg was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Physics, together with
Sheldon Glashow, and Abdus Salam who had
independently proposed a theory of
electroweak unification based on
spontaneous symmetry breaking.
In 1982 Weinberg moved to the University
of Texas at Austin as the Jack S.
Josey-Welch Foundation Regents Chair in
Science and founded the Theory Group of
the Physics Department.
There is current interest in Weinberg's
1976 proposal of the existence of new
strong interactions – a proposal dubbed
"Technicolor" by Leonard Susskind –
because of its chance of being observed
in the LHC as an explanation of the
hierarchy problem.
Steven Weinberg is frequently among the
top scientists with highest research
effect indices, such as the h-index and
the creativity index.
Other contributions in various fields
Besides his scientific research, Steven
Weinberg has been a prominent 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 books
on science written for the public
combine the typical scientific
popularization with what is
traditionally considered history and
philosophy of science and atheism.
Weinberg was a major participant in what
is known as the Science Wars, standing
with Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt, Alan
Sokal, Lewis Wolpert, and Richard
Dawkins, on the side arguing for the
hard realism of science and scientific
knowledge and against the
constructionism proposed by such social
scientists as Stanley Aronowitz, Barry
Barnes, David Bloor, David Edge, Harry
Collins, Steve Fuller, and Bruno Latour.
Political ideas
Weinberg is also known for his support
of Israel. He wrote an essay titled
"Zionism and Its Cultural Adversaries"
to explain his views on the issue.
Weinberg has canceled trips to
universities in the United Kingdom
because of British boycotts directed
towards Israel. He has explained:
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.
Personal
He is married to Louise Weinberg and has
one daughter, Elizabeth.
= Religion=
His views on religion were expressed in
a speech from 1999 in Washington, D.C.:
"'Religion is an insult to human
dignity. With or without it you would
have good people doing good things and
evil people doing evil things. But for
good people to do evil things, that
takes religion."
He modified his comment in a later
article derived from these talks:
"Frederick Douglass told in his
Narrative how his condition as a slave
became worse when his master underwent a
religious conversion that allowed him to
justify slavery as the punishment of the
children of Ham. Mark Twain described
his mother as a genuinely good person,
whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but
who had no doubt about the legitimacy of
slavery, because in years of living in
antebellum Missouri she had never heard
any sermon opposing slavery, but only
countless sermons preaching that slavery
was God's will. With or without
religion, good people can behave well
and bad people can do evil; but for good
people to do evil – that takes
religion."
He has also said:
"The more the universe seems
comprehensible, the more it seems
pointless."
He attended and was a speaker at the
Beyond Belief symposium in November
2006.
Honors and awards
The honors and awards that Professor
Weinberg received include:
Honorary Doctor of Science degrees from
a dozen 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
National Academy of Sciences, elected
1972
J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize,
1973
Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical
Physics, 1977
Steel Foundation Science Writing Award,
1977, for authorship of The First Three
Minutes
Elliott Cresson Medal, 1979
Nobel Prize in Physics, 1979
Elected to American Philosophical
Society, Royal Society of London,
Philosophical Society of Texas
James Madison Medal of Princeton
University, 1991
National Medal of Science, 1991
Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about
Science, 1999.
2002 Humanist of the Year, American
Humanist Association
Benjamin Franklin Medal for
Distinguished Achievement in the
Sciences, American Philosophical
Society, 2004
James Joyce Award, University College
Dublin, 2009
Selected publications
= Bibliography: books authored /
coauthored=
Gravitation and Cosmology: Principles
and Applications of the General Theory
of Relativity
The First Three Minutes: A Modern View
of the Origin of the Universe
The Discovery of Subatomic Particles
Elementary Particles and the Laws of
Physics: The 1986 Dirac Memorial
Lectures
Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for
the Fundamental Laws of Nature, ISBN
0-09-922391-0
The Quantum Theory of Fields
Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural
Adversaries
Glory and Terror: The Coming Nuclear
Danger
Cosmology
Lake Views: This World and the Universe,
Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, ISBN 0-674-03515-1.
Lectures on quantum mechanics
To Explain the World: The Discovery of
Modern Science, Harper/HarperCollins
Publishers, ISBN 978-0062346650
= Scholarly articles=
Weinberg, S. "A Model of Leptons". Phys.
Rev. Lett. 19: 1264–1266.
Bibcode:1967PhRvL..19.1264W.
doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.19.1264. 
Weinberg, S. & G. Feinberg. "Law of
Conservation of Muons", Columbia
University, University of
California-Berkeley, United States
Department of Energy,.
Pais, A., Weinberg, S., Quigg, C.,
Riordan, M., Panofsky, W.K.H. & V.
Trimble. "100 years of elementary
particles", Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center United States Department of
Energy, Beam Line, vol. 27, issue 1,
Spring 1997..
Weinberg, S. "Pions in Large N Quantum
Chromodynamics". Phys. Rev. Lett. 105:
261601. arXiv:1009.1537.
Bibcode:2010PhRvL.105z1601W.
doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.261601. 
Weinberg, S. "Collapse of the State
Vector". Phys. Rev. A 85: 062116.
arXiv:1109.6462.
Bibcode:2012PhRvA..85f2116W.
doi:10.1103/physreva.85.062116. 
= Popular articles=
A Designer Universe?, a refutation of
attacks on the theories of evolution and
cosmology 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, May 10, 2012,
New York Review of Books. 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 for the provision of
adequate education, healthcare,
transportation and communication
infrastructure, and criminal justice and
law enforcement.
References and notes
His Nobel prize autobiography serves as
a general reference to this article.
External links
Biography and Bibliographic Resources,
from the Office of Scientific and
Technical Information, United States
Department of Energy
Home Page of Steven Weinberg at
University of Texas at Austin
Steven Weinberg on LHC on YouTube
In CERN Courier, Steven Weinberg
reflects on spontaneous symmetry
breaking
Oral history interview transcript with
Steven Weinberg June 28, 1991, American
Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library
& Archives
Publications on ArXiv
Leslie, J, "Never-ending universe", a
review in the Times Literary Supplement
of Weinberg's 2015 book To explain the
World.
