22 Facts About Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg was an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.

Steven Weinberg held the Josey Regental Chair in Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a member of the Physics and Astronomy Departments.

Steven Weinberg served as a consultant at the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, president of the Philosophical Society of Texas, and member of the Board of Editors of Daedalus magazine, the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, the JASON group of defense consultants, and many other boards and committees.

Steven Weinberg's parents were Jewish immigrants; his father, Frederick, worked as a court stenographer, while his mother, Eva, was a housewife.

Steven Weinberg was in the same graduating class as Sheldon Glashow, whose research, independent of Weinberg's, resulted in their sharing the 1979 Nobel in physics.

Steven Weinberg received his bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 1954.

Steven Weinberg then went to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, where he started his graduate studies and research.

Steven Weinberg did research in a variety of topics of particle physics, such as the high energy behavior of quantum field theory, symmetry breaking, pion scattering, infrared photons and quantum gravity.

Steven Weinberg was appointed the senior scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

In 1966, Steven Weinberg left Berkeley and accepted a lecturer position at Harvard.

In 1973, Steven Weinberg proposed a modification of the Standard Model that did not contain that model's fundamental Higgs boson.

Steven Weinberg became Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Harvard University in 1973, a post he held until 1983.

In 1982 Weinberg moved to the University of Texas at Austin as the Jack S Josey-Welch Foundation Regents Chair in Science, and started a theoretical physics group at the university that now has eight full professors and is one of the leading research groups in the field in the US.

Steven Weinberg is frequently listed among the top scientists with the highest research effect indices, such as the h-index and the creativity index.

Science News named him along with fellow theorists Murray Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman the leading physicists of the era, commenting, "Among his peers, Steven Weinberg was one of the most respected figures in all of physics or perhaps all of science".

Besides his scientific research, Steven Weinberg was a public spokesman for science, testifying before Congress in support of the Superconducting Super Collider, writing articles for The New York Review of Books, and giving various lectures on the larger meaning of science.

In 2016, Steven Weinberg became a default leader for faculty and students opposed to a new law allowing the carrying of concealed guns in UT classrooms.

Steven Weinberg announced that he would prohibit guns in his classes, and said he would stand by his decision to violate university regulations in this matter even if faced with a lawsuit.

Steven Weinberg never retired and taught at UT until his death.

In 1954 Steven Weinberg married Louise Goldwasser and they had a daughter, Elizabeth.

Louise Steven Weinberg went on to become a law professor at the University of Texas.

Steven Weinberg died on July 23,2021, at age 88 at a hospital in Austin, where he had been undergoing treatment for several weeks.