Steven Weinberg (; born May 3, 1933) 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 physical 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.
== Education and early life ==
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 their (and
Abdus Salam) sharing the 1979 Nobel in Physics
(see below).
Weinberg received his bachelor's degree from
Cornell University in 1954. He then went to
the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen where
he started his graduate studies and research.
After one year, Weinberg moved to Princeton
University where he earned his PhD degree
in physics in 1957, for research supervised
by Sam Treiman.
== Career and research ==
After completing his PhD, Weinberg worked
as a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University
(1957–1959) and University of California,
Berkeley (1959) and then he 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. 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 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 (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: 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 (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, 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 Eugene 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 (including his
own in his 1967 paper) 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 (2008) 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 ===
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.
Although still teaching physics, he has, in
recent years, 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, he became a default figurehead
for faculty and students opposed to a new
law that allowed the carrying of concealed
guns in UT classrooms. Weinberg announced
that he would be prohibiting guns from his
classes, and said he would stand by his decision
to violate university regulations in this
matter even if faced with a lawsuit.
== Personal life ==
Weinberg married Louise Weinberg in 1954 and
has one daughter, Elizabeth.
=== Politics ===
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.
=== Views on religion ===
Weinberg is an atheist. Weinberg stated his
views on religion in 1999:
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.
== Honors and awards ==
The honors and awards that Professor Weinberg
received include:
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
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) and 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 ==
A list of Weinberg's publications can be found
on the arXiv and Scopus.
=== Bibliography: books authored / coauthored
===
Gravitation and Cosmology: Principles and
Applications of the General Theory of Relativity
(1972)
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
The Quantum Theory of Fields (three volumes:
I Foundations 1995, II Modern Applications
1996, III Supersymmetry 2000, Cambridge University
Press, ISBN 0521670535, ISBN 0521670543, ISBN
0521660009)
Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries
(2001, 2003, HUP)
Glory and Terror: The Coming Nuclear Danger
(2004, NYRB)
Cosmology (2008, OUP)
Lake Views: This World and the Universe (2010),
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
ISBN 0-674-03515-1.
Lectures on quantum mechanics (2012, CUP)
To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern
Science (2015), Harper/HarperCollins Publishers,
ISBN 978-0062346650
Third Thoughts (2018), Belknap Press, ISBN
978-0674975323
=== Scholarly articles ===
Weinberg, S (1967). "A Model of Leptons" (PDF).
Phys. Rev. Lett. 19: 1264–1266. Bibcode:1967PhRvL..19.1264W.
doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.19.1264. Archived
from the original (PDF) on 2012-01-12.
Weinberg, S. & G. Feinberg. "Law of Conservation
of Muons", Columbia University, University
of California-Berkeley, United States Department
of Energy (through predecessor agency the
Atomic Energy Commission), (Feb. 1961).
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. (April 1, 1997).
Weinberg, S (2010). "Pions in Large N Quantum
Chromodynamics". Phys. Rev. Lett. 105: 261601.
arXiv:1009.1537. Bibcode:2010PhRvL.105z1601W.
doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.261601. PMID 21231642.
Weinberg, S (2012). "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
(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, 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 ==
== External links ==
Steven Weinberg on INSPIRE-HEP
Appearances on C-SPAN
