Person · theoretical physicist
Abdus Salām
Born at Jhang in 1926, educated at Government College Lahore and Cambridge, and awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg for the electroweak theory that unified electromagnetism with the weak nuclear force — the first Nobel in science to a Pakistani and to a Muslim. He founded the International Centre for Theoretical Physics at Trieste in 1964 so that physicists from poor countries would not have to emigrate permanently to do research.
- Function
- Science & medicine
- Confidence
- Qualified / contested
Worth knowing
An Ahmadi, he was reclassified as non-Muslim by Pakistan's second constitutional amendment in 1974; the word Muslim was later effaced from his gravestone at Rabwah, which now reads simply “First Nobel Laureate”.
The erasure on the gravestone followed the 1974 amendment's classification of Ahmadis; the fact is documented and its politics remain contested in Pakistan.
Connections (2)
- AnalogueMadras / Chennai
Ramanujan and Abdus Salam are the same story told twice, forty years apart, and Salam did something about it. Ramanujan worked out his notebooks as a clerk at the Madras Port Trust and could only be recognised by going to Cambridge, where he died of the climate and the food. Salam, from Jhang, went to Cambridge too, and afterwards found he could not do research in Pakistan and keep it up. So in 1964 he founded the International Centre for Theoretical Physics at Trieste, expressly so that physicists from poor countries would not have to emigrate for good.
- Alternative toMuhammad Ali Jinnah
Jinnah's Pakistan and what happened to its only science Nobel laureate are hard to hold in the same frame. Salam was born at Jhang in 1926, took the Physics prize in 1979 for the electroweak unification, advised the government on science policy and founded its space agency. He was also an Ahmadi, and the second constitutional amendment of 1974 declared Ahmadis non-Muslim; the word Muslim was later effaced from his gravestone at Rabwah, which now reads simply First Nobel Laureate.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Abdus Salam”. Nobel Foundation biographical note, 1979; Gordon Fraser, Cosmic Anger: Abdus Salam, the First Muslim Nobel Scientist (2008).
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