Steven Weinberg
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Steven Weinberg  |
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 Steven Weinberg
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| Born | May 3, 1933 New York City, New York, USA |
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| Residence | United States |
| Nationality | United States |
| Ethnicity | Ashkenazi Jewish |
| Fields | Physicist |
| Institutions | MIT Harvard University University of Texas at Austin |
| Alma mater | Cornell University Princeton University |
| Doctoral advisor | Sam Treiman |
| Doctoral students | Mark G. Raizen John Preskill |
| Known for | Electromagnetism and Weak Force unification Weinberg-Witten theorem |
| Influenced | Alan Guth |
| Notable awards | Nobel Prize in Physics (1979) |
| Religious stance | Atheist |
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Notes
He is married to the professor of law, Louise Weinberg. |
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Steven Weinberg (born May 3, 1933) is an American physicist, and Nobel laureate in Physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.
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[edit] Biography
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 the 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.
[edit] 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.
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 boson (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][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]
[edit] 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.
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, Barry 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 canceled trips to universities 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.[16]
His views on religion were expressed in a speech from 1999 in Washington, D.C.:
- "Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or 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."[citation needed]
He attended and was a speaker at the Beyond Belief symposium on November 2006.
[edit] Personal
He is married to Louise Weinberg and has one daughter, Elizabeth.
[edit] Honours 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, 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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 Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (1993), ISBN 0-09-922391-0
- The 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)
- Cosmology (2008, OUP)
[edit] References and notes
- ^ 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
- ^ 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.
- ^ Interview for Texas Monthly Talks.
- ^ Secular Philosophy
- ^ "Nobel laureate cancels London trip due to anti-Semitism", YNet News Jewish Daily, 24 May 2007. Retrieved on June 1.
[edit] External links
- Home Page of Steven Weinberg at University of Texas at Austin
- In CERN Courier, Steven Weinberg reflects on spontaneous symmetry breaking
- Steven Weinberg praises teams for Higgs Theory
- Oral history interview transcript with Steven Weinberg 28 June 1991, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Weinberg, Steven |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 3 May 1933 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | New York, U.S. |
| DATE OF DEATH | |
| PLACE OF DEATH | |
