| Steven Weinberg  Born: 3-May-1933
Birthplace: New York City
Gender: Male
Religion: Atheist
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Physicist Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Electroweak Theory In 1967, American physicist Steven Weinberg proposed a unification theory — that weak and electromagnetic interactions, long thought to be two distinct forces, are instead two characterizations of the same fundamental force. He said later that the idea occurred to him out of the blue as he was driving to work at MIT. Now known as the electroweak theory, his eureka moment and the work that followed, explaining and confirming it, won Weinberg the Nobel Prize in 1979. The honor was shared with Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam, who conducted independent but related research leading to the same conclusion. In a rather remarkable coincidence, Glashow and Weinberg had been high school classmates decades earlier at the Bronx High School of Science.
Electroweak theory is a cornerstone of the present-day standard model of elementary-particle physics, providing a comprehensive illustration of the basic units of matter and their behavior, and fits nearly perfectly with virtually all the pertinent data collected by experimental physics. Weinberg has also contributed respected research in cosmology, gravity theory, high energy behavior of quantum field theory, infrared photons, particle physics, pion scattering, quantum field theory, supersymmetry, symmetry breaking, and technicolor theory (which has nothing to do with movies). Father: Frederick Weinberg
Mother: Eva Weinberg
Wife: Louise (law professor at the University of Texas, m. 1954, one daughter)
Daughter: Elizabeth (b. 1963)
High School: Bronx High School of Science, Bronx, NY (1950)
University: BS Physics, Cornell University (1954)
Scholar: Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen (1954-55)
University: PhD Physics, Princeton University (1957)
Scholar: Physics, Columbia University (1957-59)
Scholar: Physics, University of California at Berkeley (1959-60)
Lecturer: Physics, University of California at Berkeley (1960-66)
Lecturer: Physics, Harvard University (1966-67)
Professor: Visiting Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1967-68)
Professor: Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1969-73)
Professor: Higgins Professor of Physics, Harvard University (1973-82)
Professor: Josey Professor of Science, University of Texas at Austin (1982-)
J. Robert Oppenheimer Prize 1973
Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics 1977
Nobel Prize for Physics 1979 (with Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam)
Elliott Cresson Gold Medal of the Franklin Institute 1979
National Medal of Science 1991
Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science 1999
Humanist of the Year 2002
American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1968
American Philosophical Society
Biden for President
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Board of Sponsors
Committee for Skeptical Inquiry Fellow
CSICOP
National Academy of Sciences 1972
Federation of American Scientists Board of Directors
International Astronomical Union
JASON
Kay Bailey Hutchison for Senate
National Academy of Sciences 1972
Philosophical Society of Texas
Royal Society Foreign Member
Author of books:
Gravitation and Cosmology (1971, physics)
The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (1977, popular science)
The Discovery of Subatomic Particles (1983, physics)
Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics (1987, physics; with Richard Feynman)
The Theory of Subatomic Particles, Gravitation and Cosmology (1990, physics)
Dreams of a Final Theory (1993, popular science)
The Quantum Theory of Fields (1995-97, textbook; two volumes)
Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries (2001, popular science)
Glory and Terror: The Coming Nuclear Danger (2004, physics)
Cosmology (2008, physics)
Lake Views: This World and the Universe (2010, popular science)
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