Steven Weinberg

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Steven Weinberg
Steven Weinberg
Born	May 3, 1933 (1933-05-03) (age 74) New York, U.S.
Residence	U.S.
Nationality	U.S. American
Institutions	MIT, Harvard University University of Texas at Austin
Alma mater	Cornell University Princeton University Bronx High School of Science
Academic advisor	Sam Treiman
Notable students	John Preskill
Known for	Unification of Electromagnetism and the Weak Force
Notable prizes	Nobel Prize in Physics (1979)

Steven Weinberg (born May 3, 1933) is an American physicist. He was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics (with colleagues Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow) for combining electromagnetism and the weak force into the electroweak force.

1 Birth and education
2 Academic career
3 Other intellectual legacy
4 Selected honors and awards
5 Popular articles
6 Bibliography
7 References and notes
8 External links

Steven Weinberg was born in 1933 in New York City, the son of Jewish parents Frederick and Eva Weinberg.

He graduated from Bronx High School of Science in 1950 and received his bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 1954, living at the Cornell branch of 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. in Physics in 1957, studying under Sam Treiman.

After completing his Ph.D., Weinberg worked as a professor at Columbia University (1957-1959) and UC-Berkeley (1959-1966) and 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^[1]. 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 ^[2] 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 visiting professor at MIT. It was in that year at MIT that Weinberg proposed his model of unification of nuclear weak forces and electromagnetism^[3]. An important feature of this model is the prediction of the existence of another interaction, besides electromagnetic, between leptons, known as neutral current. This proposal is now known as the Standard Model of elementary particle physics and is the highest cited theoretical work ever in high energy physics as of 2007^[4]. The Standard Model is the best description of Nature at scales from about a few GeV to about 200 GeV.

After the 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. In 1973, he proposed the theory of Strong Interations without the so called Higgs bosons (as was earlier thought) and explicitly conjectured the confinement of quarks and gluons. 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) that a sensible quantum field theory must be renormalizable^[5]. This approach allowed the development of effective theory of quantum gravity^[6], low energy QCD, heavy quark effective field theory and other developments, and it is a topic of considerable interest in current research. Of a more speculative nature, it is also of present interest his idea on the existence of new strong interactions^[7] -- a proposal dubbed "Technicolor" by Leonard Susskind -- because of its chance of being observed in the LHC as an explanation of the hierarchy problem.

After the discovery of the neutral currents -- i.e. the discovery of the inferred existence of the Z boson --, Steven Weinberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979.

Weinberg became Higgins Professor of Physics at Harvard University in 1973, a position he held until 1982 when he 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.

His influence and importance in science can be somewhat gauged by the fact that Prof Weinberg is often among the top scientists with highest research impact indices, such as the h-index and the creativity index^[8].

He is married to Louise Weinberg and has one daughter, Elizabeth.

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, Bary Barnes, David Bloor, David Edge, Harry Collins, Steve Fuller, and Bruno Latour.

Weinberg is also known for his support of Israel. While this is not extraordinary in itself, he, like many American Jews, supports Israel from a liberal point of view. He wrote an essay titled "Zionism and Its Cultural Adversaries" to explain his views on the issue.

Weinberg has cancelled trips to universites 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.^[9]

Despite his support of a nation-state that justifies its existance as the will of a creator god, he expressed the following view on religion in a speech from 1999 in Washington, D.C.:

"Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

He attended and was a speaker at the Beyond Belief symposium on November 2006.

The honors and awards that Prof Weinberg received include

Honorary Doctor of Science degrees from dozen institutions: University of Chicago, Knox College, City University of New York, University of Rochester, Yale University, Clark University, City University of New York, Dartmouth College, Weizmann Institute, Clark University, Washington College, Columbia University.
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.

A Designer Universe?, critically discussing the possibility of the intelligent design of the universe, 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.

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
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)

^ A partial list of this work is: Weinberg, S. Phys. Rev. 118 838-849 (1960); Weinberg, S. Phys.Rev. 127 965-970 (1962); Weinberg, S. Phys. Rev. Lett. 17 616-621 (1966); Weinberg, S. Phys.Rev. 140 B516-B524 (1965).
^ Weinberg, S. Phys.Rev. 133, B1318-B1332 (1964); Weinberg, S. Phys.Rev. 134 B882-B896 (1964); Weinberg, S. Phys. Rev. 181 1893-1899 (1969)
^ Weinberg, S. Phys.Rev.Lett. 19 1264-1266 (1967).
^ A list of the top cited papers in high energy physics can be found at http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/topcites/
^ Weinberg, S. Physica 96A, 327 (1979)
^ Donoghue, J. F. Phys. Rev. D 50, 3874 (1994)
^ Weinberg, S. Phys. Rev. D13 974–996 (1976).
^ In 2006 it was measured that Weinberg has the second highest creativity index among physicists http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/10/8/13/1
^ Nobel laureate cancels London trip due to anti-Semitism. YNet News Jewish Daily (24). Retrieved on June 1, 2007.