Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg
Steven Weinberg at the 2010 Texas Book Festival
Born	(1933-05-03) May 3, 1933 New York City, USA
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	Cornell University Princeton University
Known for	Electromagnetism and Weak Force unification Weinberg-Witten theorem
Spouse	Louise Weinberg (m. 1954; 1 child)
Awards	Nobel Prize in Physics (1979)
Scientific career
Fields	Theoretical Physics
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley MIT Harvard University University of Texas at Austin
Doctoral advisor	Sam Treiman
Doctoral students	Orlando Alvarez Claude Bernard Lay Nam Chang Bob Holdom Nicholas C. Tsamis Ubirajara van Kolck Rafael Lopez-Mobilia Fernando Quevedo Mark G. Raizen Scott Willenbrock John Preskill

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.

Biography

Steven Weinberg was born in 1933 in New York City to Jewish immigrants Frederick and Eva Weinberg. He graduated from Bronx High School of Science in 1950 in the same graduating class as Sheldon Glashow, whose own research, independent of Weinberg's, would result in them (and Abdus Salam) sharing the same 1979 Nobel in Physics (see below).

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 Ph.D. degree in Physics in 1957, studying under Sam Treiman. Weinberg is an atheist.

Academic career

After completing his Ph.D., Weinberg worked as a post-doctoral 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, 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 (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 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.

It is of special importance that 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 completely 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's influence and importance are confirmed by the fact that he is frequently among the top scientists with highest research effect indices, such as the h-index and the creativity index.

Other intellectual 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.

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.

His views on religion were expressed in a speech from 1999 in Washington, D.C.:

"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. R. Oppenheimer Prize, 1973
• Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, 1977
• Steel Foundation Science Writing Award, 1977, for authorship of The First Three Minutes (1977)
• Elliott Cresson Medal (Franklin Institute), 1979
• Nobel Prize in Physics, 1979
• Elected to American Philosophical Society, Royal Society of London (Foreign Honorary Member), 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 (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: 1995, 1996, 2003)
• 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)

Scholarly articles

• Weinberg, S., A Model of Leptons, Phys. Rev. Lett. 19, 1264–1266 (1967) – the electroweak unification paper 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 (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. "Pions in Large N Quantum Chromodynamics", Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 261601 (December 20, 2010)

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, New York Review of Books, May 10, 2012. Weinberg places the cancellation of the SSC in the context of a bigger national and global socio-economic crisis, and not just for science.

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
• 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