Steven Weinberg

Facts

Steven Weinberg

Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.

Steven Weinberg
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1979

Born: 3 May 1933, New York, NY, USA

Died: 23 July 2021, Austin, TX, USA

Affiliation at the time of the award: Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

Prize motivation: “for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including, inter alia, the prediction of the weak neutral current”

Prize share: 1/3

Work

According to modern physics, four fundamental forces exist in nature. Electromagnetic interaction is one of these. The weak interaction—responsible, for example, for the beta decay of nuclei—is another. Thanks to contributions made by Steven Weinberg, Sheldon Glashow, and Abdus Salam in 1968, these two interactions were unified to one single, called electroweak. The theory predicted, for example, that weak interaction manifests itself in “neutral weak currents” when certain elementary particles interact. This was later confirmed.

To cite this section
MLA style: Steven Weinberg – Facts. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Sat. 9 Dec 2023. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1979/weinberg/facts/>

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