In the vast majority of cases, a Nobel Prize is considered to be the absolute culmination of a scientific life. However, if you look at the achievements of the physicist Steven Weinberg, the award becomes a minor matter, little more than an administrative act. There is hardly any other physicist who shaped the development of modern particle physics from the sixties to the eighties like Steven Weinberg.
Weinberg, born on May 3, 1933 in New York, was the only child of the Jewish couple Frederick and Eva Weinberg. His father was a court stenographer, his mother a housewife. His interest in natural sciences, he once said, awoke with a chemistry kit that a cousin passed on to him who preferred boxing – a momentous gift. A steep career in physics followed, Weinberg worked at the University of California at Berkeley, at MIT and was a professor at Harvard for a long time before he moved to the University of Texas at Austin in 1982, where his wife Louise – they had been married since 1954 – was a law professor was.
Weinberg made his most important discovery in the 1960s, when he developed a theory that combined electromagnetism with so-called weak nuclear force, similar to what James Clerk Maxwell had done with electricity and magnetism in the 19th century. Steven Weinberg was also the first to recognize that the Higgs mechanism, which had just been developed by Peter Higgs and others at the time, can be used in the model to give particles a mass in a mathematically consistent manner. The Higgs boson required for this was discovered at Cern in 2012.
This created the basis of the standard model of particle physics that has been accepted to this day; for this, Steven Weinberg received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 together with Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam. Actually, this work is atypical for him, said Weinberg later. Specific models with concrete predictions are not his style at all.
But Weinberg also made important contributions in cosmology and wrote several textbooks that are reference works to this day. He also made a name for himself as a science writer. His popular science book “The First Three Minutes” about the beginnings of the universe from 1977 has become a modern classic. It also contains one of the author’s most famous quotes: “The more understandable the universe appears, the more meaningless it appears.”
Throughout his life, Steven Weinberg was a staunch atheist and champion of a scientific view of the world, which he did not always make friends with. In 2015 his book “To Explain the World” was published about the development not only of modern physics, but also of what is now considered to be “scientific work”. Weinberg does not shy away from cheek: he calls Plato “silly”, Aristotle “tiresome”, Francis Bacon “overrated”, which earned him a few bitter criticisms from historians of science. And yet the book is also full of respect for researchers of bygone times. By measuring these against modern standards, he only shows how incredibly long the path the natural sciences have come to this day. It is a journey that Weinberg took part in with great passion until the end, he was still teaching this spring.
Steven Weinberg died on Friday in a hospital in Austin, Texas at the age of 88.