Steven Weinberg | Biography

Weinberg's scholarly research has focused on finding a commonality among the four fundamental forces of nature--the strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational. James Maxwell had supplied the model for this kind of research in the 1860s and 1870s when he was able to develop a single set of equations that showed how electricity and magnetism relate to each other. Weinberg chose to pursue the next step in solving this problem, finding a way to express similarities between the electromagnetic force and the weak force, a force responsible for certain types of nuclear reactions.

Weinberg's task was particularly difficult because it meant comparing two apparently vastly different forces. The electromagnetic force operates between two objects large enough to be studied with the naked eye and over apparently infinite distances, but the weak force, operates only on a nuclear level.

The type of mathematics used to deal with such discrepant frames of reference is called gauge theory. Gauge theories are attempts to find physical phenomena that remain constant in very different frames of reference. In 1967, Weinberg developed a theory that shows how electromagnetism and the weak force can be viewed as two manifestations of a single force, now called the electroweak force. For this accomplishment, he shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Abdus Salam, who developed a similar theory independently, and Sheldon Glashow, who extended the scope of the Weinberg-Salam theory.

Weinberg was born in New York City on May 3, 1933. He was educated at the Bronx High School of Science and Cornell University. He was a classmate of Glashow in both high school and college. After receiving his bachelor of science degree from Cornell in 1954 and spending a year at the Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Weinberg earned his doctorate at Princeton University in 1957.

After teaching at Columbia University (1957-1959), the University of California at Berkeley (1959-1969) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1969-1973), he was appointed Higgins Professor of Physics at Harvard University, where he remains today. Weinberg also currently holds the Josey-Welch Foundation Chair in Science at the University of Texas, Austin College of Natural Sciences. A prolific author with more than 130 papers to his credit, Weinberg has also written a very popular book about the creation of the universe, The First 3 Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (1977), a scholarly text titled Gravitation and Cosmology: Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity, and a book series called The Quantum Theory of Fields (1995, 1996, 2000).