Nobel-winning physicist united two of nature’s principal forces
Steven Weinberg, who was acknowledged as one of the world’s foremost theoretical physicists and won the Nobel Prize for showing how to unify two of the principal forces of nature, died July 23 in Austin. He was 88.
Weinberg’s death was announced by the University of Texas, where he had been a professor for many years.
During a long career spent in the exploration of the most basic problems of physics and cosmology, he won lasting renown as a creator of an “electroweak” theory that unifies electromagnetism and the “weak” force that operates on the subatomic scale and is one of the four forces that govern the universe.
The electroweak theory lies at the core of what physicists know as the Standard Model, a framework that guides physics in accounting for all the particles from which the world is made, and for how they influence one another.
Over a long career, Weinberg produced many books and hundreds of scientific papers at the frontiers of his discipline. Ideas, according to the stories told in the literature of physics, came to him everywhere — seated on a park bench, driving to work, at home in his study with the television playing in the background.
In awarding him its Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2004, the American Philosophical Society said he was “considered by many to be the preeminent theoretical physicist alive in the world today.”
Not many years before Weinberg came upon the physics scene, in the years shortly after World War II, science had reduced to four the number of fundamental forces that acted in the world around us. These were the relatively familiar forces of electromagnetism and gravity as well as two forces that act on subatomic particles, the strong force and the weak force.
Years of pioneering work, along with the new availability of powerful atomsmashing machines, made it possible to split apart what had once seemed to be the irreducible constituents of matter. New particles appeared in profusion, intensifying the urgency of a search to explain this unseen world and its laws.
“Our job in physics is to see things simply, to understand a great many complicated phenomena in a unified way,” Weinberg said in the science lecture that he delivered as part of the ceremonies connected to his Nobel Prize.
In 1954, he married Louise Goldwasser. In addition to his wife, survivors include their daughter.