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)
Religion	none

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. Image File history File links Steven-weinberg. ... is the 123rd day of the year (124th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1933 (MCMXXXIII) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... “NY” redirects here. ... Motto: (Out Of Many, One) (traditional) In God We Trust (1956 to date) Anthem: The Star-Spangled Banner Capital Washington D.C. Largest city New York City None at federal level (English de facto) Government Federal constitutional republic  - President George Walker Bush (R)  - Vice President Dick Cheney (R) Independence from... Motto: (Out Of Many, One) (traditional) In God We Trust (1956 to date) Anthem: The Star-Spangled Banner Capital Washington D.C. Largest city New York City None at federal level (English de facto) Government Federal constitutional republic  - President George Walker Bush (R)  - Vice President Dick Cheney (R) Independence from... Motto: (traditional) In God We Trust (official, 1956–present) Anthem: The Star-Spangled Banner Capital Washington, D.C. Largest city New York City Official language(s) None at the federal level; English de facto Government Federal Republic  - President George W. Bush (R)  - Vice President Dick Cheney (R) Independence - Declared - Recognized... Mapúa Institute of Technology (MIT, MapúaTech or simply Mapúa) is a private, non-sectarian, Filipino tertiary institute located in Intramuros, Manila. ... Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and a member of the Ivy League. ... University of Texas redirects here. ... “Cornell” redirects here. ... Princeton University is a private coeducational research university located in Princeton, New Jersey. ... The Bronx High School of Science, commonly called Bronx Science, Bronx Sci, or just Science, is a specialized New York City public high school located in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx, with no tuition charges and admission by exam (reportedly taken by more than 20,000 students). ... Sam Treiman is an American theoretical physicist who produced important research in the fields of quantum physics, plasma physics and gravity physics. ... Prof. ... Electromagnetism is the physics of the electromagnetic field: a field which exerts a force on particles that possess the property of electric charge, and is in turn affected by the presence and motion of those particles. ... The weak nuclear force or weak interaction is one of the four fundamental forces of nature. ... Image File history File links Nobel_prize_medal. ... Hannes Alfvén (1908–1995) accepting the Nobel Prize for his work on magnetohydrodynamics [1]. List of Nobel Prize laureates in Physics from 1901 to the present day. ... is the 123rd day of the year (124th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1933 (MCMXXXIII) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Not to be confused with physician, a person who practices medicine. ... Also: 1979 by Smashing Pumpkins. ... Hannes Alfvén (1908–1995) accepting the Nobel Prize for his work on magnetohydrodynamics [1]. List of Nobel Prize laureates in Physics from 1901 to the present day. ... For other uses, see Abdus Salam (disambiguation). ... Sheldon Glashow at Harvard University Professor Sheldon Lee Glashow (born December 5, 1932) is an American physicist. ... Electromagnetism is the physics of the electromagnetic field: a field which exerts a force on particles that possess the property of electric charge, and is in turn affected by the presence and motion of those particles. ... The weak nuclear force or weak interaction is one of the four fundamental forces of nature. ... In physics, the electroweak theory presents a unified description of two of the four fundamental forces of nature: electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force. ...

Birth and education

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. The Bronx High School of Science, commonly called Bronx Science, Bronx Sci, or just Science, is a specialized New York City public high school located in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx, with no tuition charges and admission by exam (reportedly taken by more than 20,000 students). ... “Cornell” redirects here. ... The Telluride Association is a non-profit organization in the United States that provides young people with free educational programs emphasizing intellectual curiosity, democratic self-governance, and social responsibility. ... The Niels Bohr Institute is part of the Niels Bohr Institute for Astronomy, Physics and Geophysics of the University of Copenhagen. ... Princeton University is a private coeducational research university located in Princeton, New Jersey. ...

Academic career

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. Columbia University is a private research university in the United States and a member of the prestigious Ivy League. ... The University of California, Berkeley (also known as Cal, UC Berkeley, UCB, or simply Berkeley) is a prestigious, public, coeducational university situated in the foothills of Berkeley, California to the east of San Francisco Bay, overlooking the Golden Gate and its bridge. ... Quantum field theory (QFT) is the quantum theory of fields. ... Promotional picture Symmetry Breaking is a rock band from Northern New Jersey, in the United States. ... In particle physics, pion (short for pi meson) is the collective name for three subatomic particles: π0, π+ and π−. Pions are the lightest mesons and play an important role in explaining low-energy properties of the strong nuclear force. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ...

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. A lepton is also a unit of currency. ... A neutral current is one of the ways in which subatomic particles can interact by means of the weak nuclear force. ... The Standard Model of Fundamental Particles and Interactions For the Standard Model in Cryptography, see Standard Model (cryptography). ...

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 Goldstone bosons 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 (physics) by Leonard Susskind -- because of its chance of being observed in the LHC as an explanation of the hierarchy problem. This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... Superstring theory is an attempt to explain all of the particles and fundamental forces of nature in one theory by modeling them as vibrations of tiny supersymmetric strings. ... Figure 1. ... In physics, an effective field theory is an approximate theory (usually a quantum field theory) that contains the appropriate degrees of freedom to describe physical phenomena occurring at a chosen length scale, but ignores the substructure and the degrees of freedom at shorter distances (or, equivalently, higher energies). ... Technicolor models are theories beyond the Standard Model (sometimes, but not always, GUTs) which do not have a scalar Higgs field. ... Leonard Susskind (born 1940[1]) is the Felix Bloch professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University in the field of string theory and quantum field theory. ... For the pop group, see Les Horribles Cernettes Construction of the CMS detector for LHC at CERN The Large Hadron Collider (short LHC) is a particle accelerator and collider located at CERN. It is currently under construction and scheduled to start operation in 2007. ... In theoretical physics, a hierarchy problem occurs when the fundamental parameters (couplings or masses) of some Lagrangian are vastly different (usually larger) than the parameters measured by experiment. ...

After the discovery of the neutral currents -- i.e. the discovery of the existence of the Z boson --, Steven Weinberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979. In physics, the W and Z bosons are the elementary particles that mediate the weak nuclear force. ...

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 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]. In economics, the Herfindahl index is a measure of the size of firms in relationship to the industry and an indicator of the amount of competition among them. ...

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

Other intellectual legacy

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. The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) was a ring particle accelerator which was planned to be built in the area around Waxahachie, TX. It was planned to have a ring circumference of 87 km (54 miles) and an energy of 20 TeV per beam, potentially enough energy to create a Higgs... The New York Review of Books (or NYRB) is a biweekly magazine on literature, culture, and current affairs published in New York which takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity. ... Science is a body of empirical, theoretical, and practical knowledge about the natural world, produced by a global community of researchers making use of a body of techniques known as scientific methods, emphasizing the observation, experimentation and scientific explanation of real world phenomena. ... Philosophy of science is the study of assumptions, foundations, and implications of science, especially in the natural sciences and social sciences. ... Part of a scientific laboratory at the University of Cologne. ... “Atheist” redirects here. ...

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. The Science wars were a series of intellectual battles in the 1990s between postmodernists and realists (though neither party would likely use the terms to describe themselves) about the nature of scientific theories. ... Norman Jay Levitt is a mathematician at Rutgers University. ... Alan David Sokal (born 1955) is a physicist at New York University. ... Lewis Wolpert Lewis Wolpert CBE FRS FRSL (born October 19, 1929) is a developmental biologist, author, and broadcaster. ... Clinton Richard Dawkins (born March 26, 1941) is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and popular science writer who holds the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. ... Look up realism, realist, realistic in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Constructionism may refer to Social constructionism Strict constructionism - a term referring to a conservative type of legal or constitutional interpretation. ... Stanley Aronowitz Stanley Aronowitz (born 1933) is professor of sociology, cultural studies, and urban education at the CUNY Graduate Center. ... David Bloor is the director of the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh (see Edinburgh School). ... David Edge (born November 12, 1954 in Blackpool, United Kingdom) is a former long-distance runner, who represented Canada at two consecutive Summer Olympics in the mens marathon. ... Harry Collins in 2004 is a professor at the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University. ... Steve Fuller was an American football player. ... Bruno Latour Bruno Latour (born June 1947, Beaune, France) is a French sociologist of science best known for his books We Have Never Been Modern, Laboratory Life, and Science in Action, describing the process of scientific research from the perspective of social construction based on field observations of working scientists. ...

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]

His views on religion were expressed in a speech from 1999 in Washington, D.C.: A map showing countries commonly considered to be part of the Middle East The Middle East is a region comprising the lands around the southern and eastern parts of the Mediterranean Sea, a territory that extends from the eastern Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. ... Antisemitism (alternatively spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism) is discrimination, hostility or prejudice directed at Jews[1] as a religious, racial, or ethnic group. ... For other uses, see Washington, D.C. (disambiguation). ...

"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.

Selected honors and awards

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

Popular articles

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. For other uses, see Intelligent design (disambiguation). ...

Bibliography

• 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 Scientist's Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature (1993)
• 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)

Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988; IPA: ) was an American physicist known for expanding the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, and particle theory. ... The Harvard University Press is a publishing house, a division of Harvard University, that is highly respected in academic publishing. ... The New York Review of Books (or NYREV) is a biweekly magazine on literature, culture, and current affairs published in New York which takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity. ...

References and notes

1. ^ 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).
2. ^ Weinberg, S. Phys.Rev. 133, B1318-B1332 (1964); Weinberg, S. Phys.Rev. 134 B882-B896 (1964); Weinberg, S. Phys. Rev. 181 1893-1899 (1969)
3. ^ Weinberg, S. Phys.Rev.Lett. 19 1264-1266 (1967).
4. ^ A list of the top cited papers in high energy physics can be found at http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/topcites/
5. ^ Weinberg, S. Physica 96A, 327 (1979)
6. ^ Donoghue, J. F. Phys. Rev. D 50, 3874 (1994)
7. ^ Weinberg, S. Phys. Rev. D13 974–996 (1976).
8. ^ In 2006 it was measured that Weinberg has the second highest creativity index among physicists http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/10/8/13/1
9. ^ Nobel laureate cancels London trip due to anti-Semitism. YNet News Jewish Daily (24). Retrieved on June 1, 2007.

is the 152nd day of the year (153rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ...

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Steven Weinberg

• [1] Publications on ArXiv
• Short biography (w/ photo)
• His articles in the New York Review of Books
• His Autobiography serves as a general reference to this article.
• The Atheism Tapes, program 2 - the transcript of an extended interview with Steven Weinberg for the Jonathan Miller BBC TV series The Atheism Tapes.
• [2] Interview for Texas Monthly Talks.