Steven Weinberg, who has died aged 88, shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on elementary particles and the interactions between them; his research, uniting two of nature’s fundamental forces – the weak and the electromagnetic – underpins what is known as the “Standard Model” of particle physics, a wildly successful theoretical framework being continuously tested by the Large Hadron Collider.
By the time he won the Nobel, Weinberg, a brilliant writer as well as a brilliant scientist, had leapt to fame with The First Three Minutes (1977), a gripping introduction to modern cosmology that became the most popular account of the beginning of the Universe until Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.
The book described the Big Bang from the first thousandth of a second of time to 3 minutes and 46 seconds afterwards, then brought the chronicle of events to a close with the line “the universe will go on expanding and cooling but not much of interest will occur for 700,000 years”.
It was also notable for Weinberg’s unremitting secularism. “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” he declared. “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”
Yet his own professed ambition to write the “ultimate textbook” that would reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics into a bedrock theory of how the Universe works, expressed in such books as Dreams of a Final Theory (1993), proved as elusive as any quest for religious truth.
Moreover the paradoxes of quantum theory (for example that cats might be simultaneously both alive and dead), forced him to confess to “some discomfort in working all my life in a theoretical framework that no one fully understands”.
Steven Weinberg was born in New York to Jewish immigrant parents on May 3 1933. His father, a court stenographer, wanted his son to follow a career in medicine, but a second-hand chemistry set he was given as a teenager put paid to that idea. For Steven, to explain the “bangs and stinks” he produced meant understanding how atoms work.
From Cornell University, Weinberg began his doctoral research at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, completing it at Princeton in 1957 with a dissertation entitled “The role of strong interactions in decay processes”.
He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, joining the Physics faculty there in 1960. In 1982, three years after winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, he moved to the University of Texas at Austin, as Josey Regental Professor of Science.
Weinberg’s published output included a classic trilogy on quantum field theory and academic papers that touched on nearly every major development in fundamental physics in the last half of the 20th century.
His non-specialist output included To Explain the World, in which he traced the birth of modern science, from ancient Greece to particle physics, concluding that “The progress of science has been largely a matter of discovering what questions should be asked.”
Though no believer in miracles, he described the creation of the state of Israel as “the greatest miracle of our time”. In 2007 he cancelled a visit to Britain after the NUJ voted to boycott Israeli goods in protest against Israel’s involvement in the 2006 war in Lebanon, saying that it was “hard to find any explanation other than anti-Semitism” for the move.
Weinberg’s other awards included the 2004 Benjamin Franklin Medal of the American Philosophical Society, which described him as “the pre-eminent theoretical physicist alive in the world today”.
In 1954 he married Louise Goldwasser, who survives him with their daughter.
Steven Weinberg, born May 3 1933, died July 23 2021