Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg, born in 1933, American physicist and Nobel laureate. Born in New York City, Weinberg graduated from Cornell University in 1954, attended Copenhagen's Nordic Institute for Theoretical Atomic Physics for a year, and obtained his doctorate from Princeton University in 1957. He taught at the University of California at Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, from 1973, at Harvard University. In 1967, together with the Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam, Weinberg offered a hypothesis that unified the known facts about the electromagnetic and the weak interactions between atomic particles (see Elementary Particles). When this so-called unification hypothesis was later tested experimentally, the outcomes it predicted proved true, unlike those of a number of alternative hypotheses. In 1979 the two physicists shared the Nobel Prize in physics with the American physicist Sheldon Lee Glashow for their contribution to the understanding of the interactions of elementary particles.