Steven Weinberg

Weinberg grew up in New York City, the son of a court stenographer who he later said gave him whatever intellectual curiosity he had. He went to the Bronx High School of Science, in the same graduating class as Sheldon Glashow, with whom he would eventually share a Nobel Prize. Cornell took him next, a physics major with a philosophy minor living at Telluride House, and then Princeton for a doctorate finished in 1957 under Sam Treiman. He moved through postdoctoral posts at Columbia and Berkeley before joining the Berkeley faculty in 1960, and it was there, and later at MIT, that he began working on the problem that would define his career — why the forces of nature look so different from each other up close.

In 1967, at MIT, Weinberg published a short paper called A Model of Leptons proposing that electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, which governs radioactive decay, were a single force that only looked separate because of how mass breaks its symmetry at low energy. Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam had circled the same idea, and the three shared the 1979 Nobel Prize once experiments confirmed the weak neutral currents the theory predicted. Weinberg's model also predicted the Higgs boson, finally observed in 2012, three decades after he wrote the paper down. He spent the rest of his career at Harvard and then the University of Texas at Austin, wrote the standard graduate textbook on quantum field theory, and turned The First Three Minutes, his account of the Big Bang, into a bestseller most working physicists have read.

Weinberg testified before Congress and wrote much of Dreams of a Final Theory, in 1992, to argue for one specific machine: the Superconducting Super Collider, an 87-kilometer ring under Texas meant to run past the energies his own theory had already been tested at and find whatever came next. Congress killed the project in October 1993, after roughly 2 billion dollars had already been spent on it, and the discovery of the Higgs boson went instead to a European collider two decades later. Weinberg called the cancellation a failure by physicists to make their case, and said so publicly for years afterward. It is a strange asterisk on a Nobel laureate's record — the theorist whose equations pointed straight at the Higgs did not get to watch the machine he had championed find it.

Weinberg kept working past 80, publishing To Explain the World, a history of science that drew criticism from historians for judging the past by present standards, in 2015. He died in an Austin hospital on July 23, 2021, after weeks of treatment, at 88. Colleagues who disagreed with him about almost everything else still called him the dominant theoretical physicist of his generation. His papers went to the University of Texas's Harry Ransom Center, and the standard model of particle physics he helped write down has passed every experimental test thrown at it since, including several designed specifically to break it.

Steven Weinberg's life against the full span of the corpus.

• A Model of Leptons article
  The three-page paper proposing electroweak unification 1967
• The First Three Minutes book
  A bestselling account of the early universe 1977
• The Quantum Theory of Fields book
  Three volumes, the standard graduate reference 1995
• Dreams of a Final Theory book
  His case for reductionism and the Superconducting Super Collider 1993
• To Explain the World book
  A history of science from a working physicist's viewpoint 2015

• May 3, 1933 aged 0 Born in New York City
• 1950 aged ~17 Graduates the Bronx High School of Science
• 1957 aged ~24 Completes his doctorate at Princeton
• 1967 aged ~34 Publishes A Model of Leptons at MIT
• 1973 aged ~40 Weak neutral currents are experimentally confirmed
• 1979 aged ~46 Shares the Nobel Prize in Physics
• 1982 aged ~49 Joins the University of Texas at Austin
• October 1993 aged 60 Congress cancels the Superconducting Super Collider
• July 23, 2021 aged 88 Dies in an Austin hospital

• Murray Gell-Mann 1929–2019
  Theoretical physicist who discovered quarks and won the Nobel Prize for his standard model of particle physics. rival theorist of the same generation
• Richard Feynman 1918–1988
  Theoretical physicist known for his work in quantum mechanics and his accessible teaching style. physicist contemporary
• J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–1967
  Theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project and became known as the father of the atomic bomb. predecessor in physics and public life
• Carl Sagan 1934–1996
  Astronomer and science communicator who brought cosmology to millions through Cosmos and popular books. fellow science popularizer