I am seeing reports that Steven Weinberg, one of the great physicists, has died.
The University of Texas has a tribute up, but I have not found a mainstream news source reporting this yet.
In 1967, Weinberg published a seminal paper laying out how two of the universe’s four fundamental forces — electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force — relate as part of a unified electroweak force. “A Model of Leptons,” at barely three pages, predicted properties of elementary particles that at that time had never before been observed (the W, Z and Higgs boson) and theorized that “neutral weak currents” dictated how elementary particles interact with one another. Later experiments, including the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, would bear out each of his predictions.
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By showing the unifying links behind weak forces and electromagnetism, which were previously believed to be completely different, Weinberg delivered the first pillar of the Standard Model, the half-century-old theory that explains particles and three of the four fundamental forces in the universe (the fourth being gravity). As critical as the model is in helping physical scientists understand the order driving everything from the first minutes after the Big Bang to the world around us, Weinberg continued to pursue, alongside other scientists, dreams of a “final theory” that would concisely and effectively explain current unknowns about the forces and particles in the universe, including gravity.
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“If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art,” he once told PBS. “Although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we’re starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves.”
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