- Person
- Steven Weinberg
- Lived
- 1933–2021
- Field
- Theoretical physics
- From
- American
The story
Most leading theoretical physicists write only for other specialists. Steven Weinberg was unusual. His own interest in physics had been sparked as a boy by popular books by George Gamow and James Jeans, and in 1977 he published The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe, a short book for general readers about the hot Big Bang.
In his introduction he explained how he pictured his reader: a smart old attorney who does not speak the physicist's language but expects to hear convincing arguments before making up his mind. As he once put it, he wrote for readers who are not mathematically trained but just as smart as he is. The book begins with a creation myth from the Norse Younger Edda, then explains how astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding and how Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson found the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965. It then describes the early universe in a series of frozen frames and shows how the Big Bang accounts for the relative amounts of hydrogen and helium in the universe today. A glossary and a mathematical supplement serve readers who want more.
It became a classic of popular science. The Physics Today reviewer Robert March wrote that it was rare to be able to say that no one's library is truly complete without a book, and Martin Gardner called it science writing at its best. It won the 1977 science writing award of the American Institute of Physics and the U.S. Steel Foundation, and Stephen Hawking later singled it out as a very good book on the early universe. A second edition in 1993 added an afterword on discoveries such as the results of the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite.
Its closing reflection, that the effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life above the level of farce, became one of the most quoted lines in science writing. Weinberg went on to write further popular books, including Dreams of a Final Theory and To Explain the World (2015).
Why it matters
The First Three Minutes introduced generations of readers to modern cosmology and inspired many to become scientists.
About Steven Weinberg
Physicist whose three-page 1967 paper unified electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, a pillar of the Standard Model, and whose The First Three Minutes brought the Big Bang to millions.
More about Steven Weinberg
- Steven Weinberg changed how physicists view their theoriesIn 1979 Steven Weinberg's folk theorem launched the modern view that quantum field theories are effective theories, valid at particular energy scales, an idea now used across physics.
- Steven Weinberg unified two forces of nature in 3 pagesIn 1967 Steven Weinberg's three-page paper A Model of Leptons showed that electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force are two faces of one force, now among the most cited papers in physics.
- Steven Weinberg helped predict the axionIn 1978 Steven Weinberg, and separately Frank Wilczek, realised that a proposed symmetry implied a new particle, the axion, now a leading candidate for the universe's dark matter.
- Steven Weinberg's theory predicted new particle processesSteven Weinberg's electroweak theory predicted a new kind of weak interaction, the neutral current, which was discovered in 1973, and the Higgs boson, found in 2012.
- Steven Weinberg worked to curb nuclear dangersSteven Weinberg advised the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, wrote Glory and Terror on the nuclear danger, and served on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Board of Sponsors from 2009.
Sources
- Steven Weinberg (1933–2021) Physics Today
- Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate in physics and Bulletin board member, dies at 88 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
- Steven Weinberg, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- The First Three Minutes Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.