Forgive the esoteric ramblings of a former Physicist. When I was in college in the late sixties, pretending to learn
Physics, there was a great buzz around the community of new work being done on the weak force. To recap simply(?),
Newton first identified the gravitational force and it was systematized into modern field mathematics by Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity.
The Electromagnetic forces were similarly lain out by Ørsted (Danish). and Faraday (English) and systematized by the Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell into a field theory.
A first theory of weak interaction was put forward in 1934 by the Italian physicist Fermi and came to represent the third field
A fourth field, the strong interaction keeps protons and neutrons together in the nucleus.
These four forces are universals that determine how the universe behaves. It was the dream of Einstein to come up with a "Unified Field Theory," that could explain the four forces with a single set of mathematics.
In 1979, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Professor Sheldon L. Glashow, Harvard University, USA, Professor Abdus Salam, International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Italy and Imperial College, Great Britain, and Professor Steven Weinberg, Harvard University, USA for their work in producing a theory, later confirmed by experiment, that unified the weak and the electromagnetic field theories. I can tell you that to the general scientific community in the late 60s that seemed impossible.
To illustrate the importance of the weak force (of which most have never heard) the specific strength of this force enables and regulates the speed of the thermonuclear fires in the center of the sun. If it were 10% weaker, the sun would never have ignited and earth would be a cold, icy planet. If it were 15% stronger, The sun would have burned a thousand times hotter, incinerated the earth, and burned out millions of years ago.
Salam. a Pakistani, died in 1996. Weinberg died this week at age 88. The passing of a genius.
Thanks for telling us about him, Frank.
