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Steven Weinberg - Unifying the Forces

© Jackie DiGiovanni

Steven Weinberg was born in 1933 in New York City to Frederick, a court stenographer, and Eva Weinberg. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. His family encouraged his strong interest in science, and by age 15 he knew his future was in theoretical physics.

He did graduate work at Cornell in 1954, where he married Louise, and at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (now called the Niels Bohr Institute) in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1955. He completed his Ph.D. at Princeton in 1957.

From 1957 through 1966 he lectured and did research at Columbia and Berkeley. His research involved areas of physics he wanted to learn more about, including high energy behavior of Feynman graphs, second-class weak interaction currents, broken symmetries and scattering theory. His daughter, Elizabeth, was born in 1963.

From 1966 through 1969 he lectured at Harvard and MIT. In 1969 he accepted a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a professor in the Physics Department. In 1973 he accepted the chair as Higgins Professor of Physics.

As described by PBS:

His most noted work has been in unified field theory. Four forces were believed to drive the laws of physics: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force (which holds an atom's nucleus together) and the weak force (which breaks an atom apart, as in radioactivity). Weinberg theorized that the electromagnetic and the weak forces are the same at extremely high energy levels. This electroweak theory was confirmed by particle accelerator experiments in 1973.

In 1979, Weinberg shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Sheldon Glashow, whom he knew from high school, and Abdus Salam for their work on unifying the weak and electromagnetic interactions between elementary particles.

Since 1982, Weinberg has been the Josey Regental Professor of Science at the University of Texas in Austin. He has authored many books and scientific papers. An extensive listing is at the library of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

In 1998, Weinberg wrote:

When during a period of normal science, it turns out that some problems can't be solved using existing theories, then new ideas proliferate, and the ideas that survive are those that do best at solving these problems...Scientists like myself...think the task of science is to bring us closer and closer to objective truth...What drives us onward in the work of science is precisely the sense that there are truths out there to be discovered, truths that once discovered will form a permanent part of human knowledge.

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