Weinberg's articles on various subjects occasionally appeared inThe New York Review of Books and other periodicals. He served as a consultant at theU.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, president of the Philosophical Society of Texas, and member of the Board of Editors ofDaedalus magazine, the Council of Scholars of theLibrary of Congress, theJASON group of defense consultants, and many other boards and committees.[5][6]
Steven Weinberg was born in 1933 in New York City.[7] His parents wereJewish[8] immigrants;[9] his father, Frederick, worked as a court stenographer, while his mother, Eva (Israel), was a housewife.[10][11] Becoming interested in science at age 16 through a chemistry set handed down by a cousin,[12][10] he graduated fromBronx High School of Science in 1950.[13] He was in the same graduating class asSheldon Glashow,[11] whose research, independent of Weinberg's, resulted in their (andAbdus Salam's) sharing the 1979 Nobel in physics.[14]
In a memoir published after his death in 2021, Weinberg wrote: "Whatever native intelligence and intellectual curiosity I may have, I owe to my parents, in particular, my father."[15]
In 1954, Weinberg received his bachelor's degree fromCornell University, where he majored in physics with a minor in philosophy. There he resided at theTelluride House. He then went to theNiels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, where he started his graduate studies and research. After one year, Weinberg moved toPrinceton University, where he earned his Ph.D. inphysics in 1957, completing his dissertation, "The role of strong interactions in decay processes", under the supervision ofSam Treiman.[3][16]
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 (such as those involved inbeta-decay andkaon-decay),[20] with the masses of the force-carriers of the weak part of the interaction being explained byspontaneous symmetry breaking. One of its fundamental aspects was the prediction of the existence of theHiggs boson. Weinberg's model, now known as theelectroweak unification theory, had the same symmetry structure as that proposed by Glashow in 1961: both included the then-unknown weak interaction mechanism betweenleptons, known asneutral current and mediated by theZ boson. The 1973 experimental discovery of weak neutral currents[21] (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.[22]
After his 1967 seminal work on the unification of weak and electromagnetic interactions, Weinberg continued his work in many aspects of particle physics, quantum field theory, gravity,supersymmetry,superstrings andcosmology. In the years after 1967, the fullStandard 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, Salam and 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 that did not contain that model's fundamental Higgs boson. Also during the 1970s, he proposed a theory later known astechnicolor, in which new strong interactions resolve thehierarchy problem.[23][24][25]
Weinberg became Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Harvard University in 1973, a post he held until 1983.[14] In 1979 with his "folk theorem", he pioneered the modern view on therenormalization aspect of quantum field theory that considers all quantum field theorieseffective 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.[26] This approach allowed the development of effective theory of quantum gravity,[27] low energy QCD, heavy quark effective field theory and other developments, and is a topic of considerable interest in current research.[28]
In 1979, some six years after the experimental discovery of the neutral currents—i.e. the discovery of the inferred existence of theZ boson—but after the 1978 experimental discovery of the theory's predicted amount of parity violation due to Z bosons' mixing with electromagnetic interactions,[29] Weinberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics with Glashow and Salam, who had independently proposed a theory of electroweak unification based on spontaneous symmetry breaking.[10][14]
In 1982 Weinberg moved to theUniversity of Texas at Austin as the Jack S. Josey-Welch Foundation Regents Chair in Science,[14] and started a theoretical physics group at the university that now has eight full professors and is one of the leading research groups in the field in the U.S.[10]
Weinberg is frequently listed among the top scientists with the highest research effect indices, such as theh-index and the creativity index.[30] The theoretical physicistPeter Woit called Weinberg "arguably the dominant figure in theoretical particle physics during its period of great success from the late sixties to the early eighties", calling his contribution toelectroweak unification "to this day at the center of the Standard Model, our best understanding of fundamental physics".[31] Science News named him along with fellow theoristsMurray Gell-Mann andRichard Feynman the leading physicists of the era, commenting, "Among his peers, Weinberg was one of the most respected figures in all of physics or perhaps all of science".[32]Sean Carroll called Weinberg one of the "best physicists we had; one of the best thinkers of any variety" who "exhibited extraordinary verve and clarity of thought through the whole stretch of a long and productive life",[33] whileJohn Preskill called him "one of the most accomplished scientists of our age, and a particularly eloquent spokesperson for the scientific worldview".[33]Brian Greene said that Weinberg had an "astounding ability to see into the deep workings of nature" that "profoundly shaped our understanding of the universe".[33] Upon the awarding of theBreakthrough Prize in 2020, one of the founders of the prizes,Yuri Milner, called Weinberg a "key architect" of "one of the most successful physical theories ever", whilestring theoristJuan Maldacena, the chair of the selection committee, said, "Steven Weinberg has developed many of the key theoretical tools that we use for the description of nature at a fundamental level".[34]
Although still teaching physics, in later years he turned his hand to the history of science, efforts that culminated inTo Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science (2015).[36] A hostile review[37] in the Wall Street Journal bySteven Shapin attracted a number of commentaries,[38] a response by Weinberg,[36] and an exchange of views between Weinberg andArthur Silverstein in theNYRB in February 2016.[39]
In 2016, Weinberg became a default leader for faculty and students opposed to a new law allowing the carrying of concealed guns in UT classrooms. He announced that he would prohibit guns in his classes, and said he would stand by his decision to violate university regulations in this matter even if faced with a lawsuit.[40] Weinberg never retired and taught at UT until his death.[10]
Weinberg was an atheist.[45] Before he was an advocate of theBig Bang theory, Weinberg said: "Thesteady-state theory is philosophically the most attractive theory because it least resembles the account given in Genesis."[46]
Weinberg was known for his support ofIsrael, which he characterized as "the 'most exposed salient' in a war between liberal democracies and Muslim theocracies."[47] He wrote the 1997 essay "Zionism and Its Adversaries" on the issue.[48][44]
In the 2000s, Weinberg canceled trips to universities in theUnited Kingdom because of the Britishboycotts of Israel. At the time, he said: "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."[49]
Pais, Abraham; Weinberg, Steven; Quigg, Chris; Riordan, Michael; Panofsky, Wolfgang K.H.; Trimble, Virginia (April 1, 1997). 100 years of elementary particles [Beam Line, vol. 27, issue 1, Spring 1997] (Report). Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI).doi:10.2172/790903.
A Designer Universe?, a refutation of attacks on the theories ofevolution andcosmology, e.g., those conducted under the rubric ofintelligent 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 fromDreams of a Final Theory by Steven Weinberg in 1992 which focuses on the nature of beauty in physical theories.
The Crisis of Big Science,The New York Review of Books, May 10, 2012. Weinberg places the cancellation of theSuperconducting Super Collider in the context of a bigger national and global socio-economic crisis, including a general crisis in funding for science research and the provision of adequate education, healthcare, transportation, and communication infrastructure, and criminal justice and law enforcement.
^abWeinberg, Steven (2001). "Zionism and Its Adversaries".Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries. Harvard University Press. pp. 181–183.ISBN0-674-01120-1.
^The essay was first published in the "Zionism at 100" issue ofThe New Republic (September 8–15, 1997, pp. 22–23). It was later reprinted in his book of collected essays,Facing Up.
Steven Weinberg on Nobelprize.org including the Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1979, "Conceptual Foundations of the Unified Theory of Weak and Electromagnetic Interactions"
