- Person
- Steven Weinberg
- Lived
- 1933–2021
- Field
- Theoretical physics
- From
- American
The story
Steven Weinberg believed that physicists have special responsibilities toward the public on questions of nuclear weapons. Alongside his research, he cultivated a long commitment to curbing nuclear proliferation.
He served as a consultant to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and was a member of JASON, an independent group of leading scientists founded in 1960, after the Sputnik launch, to advise the U.S. government on technical questions, much of it related to defence. He wrote for The New York Review of Books on nuclear policy, including an essay titled The Growing Nuclear Danger, and in 2004 he collected his writing on the subject in Glory and Terror: The Growing Nuclear Danger, warning of the risks posed by nuclear arsenals and their spread.
In 2009 he accepted an invitation to join the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the organisation founded by scientists of the Manhattan Project to warn the public about nuclear threats. The board was established by Albert Einstein and first chaired by J. Robert Oppenheimer, and its members, many of them Nobel laureates, are consulted on key issues including the setting of the Doomsday Clock. Weinberg served on the board until his death in 2021. Kennette Benedict, a former executive director of the Bulletin, said he offered unfailing support to the organisation and spoke about nuclear issues for the general public.
He combined this work with a wider role as a public voice for science. He testified before Congress in support of the Superconducting Super Collider, wrote essays on science and society, and served on the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress.
His old classmate Sheldon Glashow, with whom he shared the Nobel Prize, has also served on the Bulletin's Board of Sponsors, continuing the Bulletin's long tradition of Nobel laureates lending their voices to warnings about nuclear danger.
Why it matters
Weinberg lent the authority of a Nobel laureate to efforts to reduce the risk of nuclear war and the spread of nuclear weapons.
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 explained the Big Bang to millionsSteven Weinberg's 1977 book The First Three Minutes explained to a wide public how physics can reconstruct the earliest moments of the universe, winning a science writing award.
Sources
- Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate in physics and Bulletin board member, dies at 88 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
- Steven Weinberg Wikipedia
- JASON (advisory group) 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.