Steven Weinberg, a giant in the world of Physics, died yesterday (July 24), at the age of 88. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979, together with Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam, for his role in developing a theory unifying electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force.
From news.utexas.edu/… -
One of the most celebrated scientists of his generation, Weinberg was best known for helping to develop a critical part of the Standard Model of particle physics, which significantly advanced humanity’s understanding of how everything in the universe — its various particles and the forces that govern them — relate. A faculty member for nearly four decades at UT Austin, he was a beloved teacher and researcher, revered not only by the scientists who marveled at his concise and elegant theories but also by science enthusiasts everywhere who read his books and sought him out at public appearances and lectures.
His seminal work was a slim, three-page paper published in 1967 in the journal Physical Review Letters and entitled "A Model of Leptons." In it, he laid out how two of the universe’s four fundamental forces — electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force — relate as part of a unified electroweak force. He predicted how subatomic particles known as W, Z and the famous Higgs boson should behave — years before those particles were detected experimentally.
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.
Besides his scientific research, Steven 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. In his first very popular science book The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe in 1977, he eloquently described the beginning of the universe with the Big Bang and its expansion into the universe we see today.
Here are some tips for students of science, which are also very applicable to progressive activists like us.
Background
From en.wikipedia.org/… —
Steven Weinberg was born in 1933 in New York City. His parents were Jewish immigrants. His childhood love of science began with a gift of a chemistry set and continued through teaching himself calculus while a student at Bronx High School of Science.
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 Ph.D. in physics in 1957, completing his dissertation, titled "The role of strong interactions in decay processes".
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). It was also during this time that he developed the approach to quantum field theory that is described in his book The Quantum Theory of Fields.
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.
Weinberg became Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Harvard University in 1973.
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.
Views on Politics and Religion
Weinberg identified himself as a liberal.
Weinberg was 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 did not doubt 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.
In 2016, he became a default leader 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.
Other quotes —
- “Science doesn't make it impossible to believe in God, it just makes it possible not to believe in God”
- “One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.”
- It’s not part of the requirement of a successful physical theory that everything it describes be observable, or that all possible predictions of the theory be verifiable.
- “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless”
- “If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art. Although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we’re starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves.”
- “The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy. ”
Steven Weinberg on science and history, drawing from his book “To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science” -
Epilogue
RIP Steven Weinberg. May you live long and prosper — wherever your travels take you in the multiverse.
What are you memories of Steven Weinberg? Have you read any of his papers, text books or his books on popular science? Were you fortunate enough to take one of his courses or attend one of his lectures?
Further Reading
- Wiki — en.wikipedia.org/…
- Biography — www.nobelprize.org/…
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UT Austin Mourns Death of World-Renowned Physicist Steven Weinberg — news.utexas.edu/...