Nobel Prize Winner Steven Weinberg Dies at 88; Here's How He Made Scientific Contributions

Professor Steven Weinberg - a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and astronomer - died on Friday at 88.

The cause of death has yet to be confirmed. However, he had been hospitalized for some time, according to the Washington Post.

Weinberg's Achievement to Physics

Weinberg, born in 1933 in New York City to Jewish immigrants, had a distinguished academic career. His most notable achievement was a 1967 study on the interplay of electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, two of the universe's four fundamental forces that work together as a united electroweak force.

The research, titled "A Model of Leptons," was published in the scholarly journal Physical Review Letters and was only three pages long. However, it has had a significant impact on physics since it is one of the most-cited publications in the field of high-energy physics.

The equation-heavy paper analyzed and speculated notions and qualities that were never seen before yet crucial to the field's advancement. In later years, his predictions were confirmed, including the finding of the Higgs boson particle at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland in 2012.

He and fellow scientists Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their contribution in 1979.

Weinberg was noted for attempting to make science more approachable, despite the intricacy of his work. Live Science said he guided readers through the first minutes of the universe's existence in an easy-to-understand manner in his 1977 book The Initial Three Minutes: A Modern View of The Origin of The Universe.

Weinberg: A Science Advocate

Weinberg was well-known for more than his scientific achievements. Rather, he was a well-known activist who advocated for science. He'd testified before Congress, given lectures on the history and philosophy of science, and made headlines for opposing concealed carry in UT classrooms.

Weinberg, on the other hand, was a vocal supporter of Israel. This was highlighted in his essay "Zionism and Its Adversaries," published in 1997.

He had also been a vocal opponent of antisemitism, which he saw as being exemplified by the boycott of Israel.

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Jerusalem Post said Weinberg had canceled visits to UK institutions in the early 2000s due to UK anti-Israel boycotts. The physicist stated in a letter that he saw "a pervasive anti-Israel and antisemitic current in British opinion" as the basis for his withdrawal.

Weinberg Says There Is No Cosmic Plan

Dr. Weinberg, who never retired, taught until this year's spring semester.

Aside from the Nobel Prize, he earned other honors and medals, including the National Medal of Science in 1991 and the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievement in Science in 2004. In the United States, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in the United Kingdom, he was inducted into the Royal Society.

Last year, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, created by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Sergey Brin of Google, and Jack Ma of Alibaba, awarded him a $3 million prize for his contributions to fundamental physics.

He is survived by his wife and a granddaughter, in addition to his daughter, a medical doctor.

He was asked about his often-quoted phrase near the end of "The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe" in his interview with the Nobel Institute: "The more that the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."

"What I meant by that statement is that there is no point to be discovered in nature itself; there is no cosmic plan for us," he said per The New York Times. "We are not actors in a drama that has been written with us playing the starring role. There are laws - we are discovering those laws - but they are impersonal, they are cold."

He added: "It is not an entirely happy view of human life. I think it is a tragic view, but that is not new to physicists. A tragic view of life has been expressed by so many poets - that we are here without purpose, trying to identify something that we care about."