Steven Weinberg

Origins and early life

Steven Weinberg was born in New York City on 3 May 1933, the son of Jewish immigrants: his father Frederick was a court stenographer, his mother Eva kept the house.

Work and career

He found physics in popular books — he remembered puzzling over Heisenberg's uncertainty relation in a volume by James Jeans and realising how much he had to learn before he could follow it — and left the Bronx High School of Science in 1950 in the same class as Sheldon Glashow. He read physics at Cornell, spent a year at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and took his doctorate at Princeton in 1957 under Sam Treiman.

His great paper, “A Model of Leptons”, ran to three pages in 1967. It proposed that the electromagnetic force and the weak force that governs radioactive decay are two faces of one interaction, split apart in the early universe by spontaneous symmetry breaking, and it required a new carrier, the Z boson, and with it a neutral current no one had yet seen. The current turned up at CERN in 1973, the parity violation it implied in 1978, and in 1979 Weinberg shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Glashow and Abdus Salam.

Electroweak unification has stood at the centre of the Standard Model ever since. He wrote for the public as well: The First Three Minutes (1977) told the story of the Big Bang for general readers. He taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1982 until his death there on 23 July 2021.