Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, has died
By Tia Ghose - Assistant Managing Editor about 2 hours ago
The physicist unified two of the four fundamental forces.
Steven Weinberg, a Nobel-prize winning physicist whose work helped link two of the four fundamental forces, has died at the age of 88, the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) announced Saturday (July 24).
HIs work was foundational to the Standard Model, the overarching physics theory that describes how subatomic particles behave. His seminal work was a slim, three-page paper published in 1967 in the journal Physical Review Letters and entitled "A Model of Leptons." In it, he predicted how subatomic particles known as W, Z and the famous Higgs boson should behave — years before those particles were detected experimentally, according to a statement from UT Austin.
The paper also helped unify the electromagnetic force and the weak force and predicted that so-called "neutral weak currents" governed how particles would interact, according to the statement. In 1979, Weinberg and physicists Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam earned the Nobel Prize in physics for this work. Throughout his life, Weinberg would continue his search for a unified theory that would unite all four forces, according to the statement.
Weinberg also had a knack for making physics accessible to everyone. His book "The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe," (Basic Books, 1977) described, in exciting and simple language, those first minutes of the universe's infancy and laid out the case for the expansion of the universe.
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https://www.livescience.com/physicist-steven-weinberg-dies.html?utm_source=notification
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