Steven Weinberg, Groundbreaking Nobelist in Physics, Dies at 88
His discoveries deepened understanding of the basic forces at play in the universe, and he took general readers back to its dawn in his book “The First Three Minutes.”
Steven Weinberg, a theoretical physicist who discovered that two of the universe’s forces are really the same, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize, and who helped lay the foundation for the development of the Standard Model, a theory that classifies all known elementary particles in the universe, making it one of the most important breakthroughs in physics in the 20th century, died on Friday in a hospital in Austin, Texas. He was 88.
In 2015, Dr. Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist at Columbia University, invited Dr. Weinberg to be the inaugural speaker at a new lecture series at the university called “On the Shoulders of Giants.” While introducing his guest, Dr. Greene related how, in the early 1980s, he was working at I.B.M. when he was invited to give a lecture at the University of Texas at Austin, where Dr. Weinberg was a professor. When he told his boss, John Cocke, a pioneer of computer science, that Dr. Weinberg would be at the talk, Dr. Cocke warned him, “You should know, there are Nobel laureates and then there are Nobel laureates.” Dr. Weinberg was in the second category.
Though he had the respect, almost awe, of his colleagues for his scientific abilities and insights, he also possessed a rare ability among scientists to communicate and explain abstruse scientific ideas to the public. He was a sought-after speaker, and he wrote several popular books about science, notably “The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe” (1977).
