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Building a new vision
The FAMOUS Pakistani recipient of the Nobel Prize, Prof Abdus Salam, was born in a lower middle-class family in Jhang on Jan 29, 1926. He received his early education from an Urdu medium school and received the highest marks ever achieved in matriculation examinations given by the Board of Punjab.
He completed his BA from Government College Lahore and MA from the Punjab University. Being a brilliant student, he was admitted to the Cambridge University and after just a year, he received a degree in physics in 1949. Prof Salam received a lot of recognition in 1950 when he managed to solve an important problem of the renormalization theory.
In 1951, he returned to Pakistan to teach mathematics at Government College Lahore. Back home, Professor Salam faced many problems, most of which stemmed from a lack of facilities and indifference towards research and science. He tried to make do with what was offered to him, but disappointment got the better of him and in 1954 he went back to Britain.
It was then that he began seriously pursuing a scientific career. In the early sixties, Prof Salam had acquired a certain degree of respectability among the top particle physicists. Encouraged by such prominence, he went ahead and did his PhD in theoretical physics from Cambridge. Once he was through with that, Prof Salam persuaded his European and American colleagues to help him establish an institute for physicists from the developing world. He hoped that physicists of Third World countries would channelize their skills in such an institute. Thus, with the support of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Prof Salam developed the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy.
Grand Unification Theory
Also known as the theory of everything, this concept has been considered as an important development in the world of physics. The Unified Theory attempts to unify four important forces — gravitation, electromagnetism, strong forces (which hold atomic nuclei together) and weak forces (responsible for slow nuclear processes, such as beta decay). The weak nuclear force is the one that causes the Sun to convert hydrogen into nuclear energy.
These forces have been put together with the theory of unification under the same mathematical scaffold. It works on the concept that all these forces are just different manifestations of the same thing. In 1967-68, the Americans physicists Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glasgow, besides Prof Salam discovered a connection between the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism.
They showed that when enough energy was supplied, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force combined to form an electroweak force. They tried to prove this notion of unifying the weak and electromagnetic interaction by using a mathematical technique called Gauge Symmetry. According to this theory, the electromagnetic interaction is composed of the exchange of a photon and a weak interaction of the exchange of W and Z, intermediate “bosons.”
The bosons are believed to be a part of the same family of particles as photons. Theoretical physicists are currently trying to combine the electroweak theory with the strong nuclear force. Their research is based on symmetry theories. Such attempts are known as Grand Unification Theories (GUTs).
His contributions
Prof Salam received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1979 along with his colleagues Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glasgow. His electroweak theory is also responsible for radioactivity.
Prof Salam was no Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein. Neither did he ever claim to be one. But his achievement of unifying the two basic forces of nature has had a great impact on the development of physics. His work is considered to be deeper and more insightful than the works of many other Nobel Prize winners of the twentieth century.
Today, the Unification Theory is the central standard model of high energy physics. Electroweak unification is believed to be the first step towards the “Holy Grail” of physics, for it is a comprehensive theory uniting all possible interactions in nature.
Even today, the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) is gathering young physicists from all over the world and is trying to encourage research on the subject. It’s promoting communication between scientists of the developed and underdeveloped countries.
Prof Abdus Salam also served Pakistan as an advisor on science policy. He was a member of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, the Scientific Commission of Pakistan and was the chief scientific advisor to the president of Pakistan from 1961 to 1974.
He remained devoted to the field of science throughout his life. He died on Nov 20, 1996. Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy, who had met Prof Salam, writes in his article Encounters with Salam: “Strong, assertive, enthusiastic, vibrant, bluntly authoritarian, and with a mind as sharp as a razor’s edge, Abdus Salam was a most remarkable person.” Indeed, truer words have rarely, if ever, been spoken.— SEK
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