Abdus Salam
Abdus Salam ( Urdu عبد السلام DMG ʿAbd as-Salām ; * January 29, 1926 in Jhang , Punjab , British India , today Pakistan ; † November 21, 1996 in Oxford , England ) was a Pakistani physicist and the first Muslim Nobel Prize winner in physics. Salam dealt with elementary particle physics and quantum field theory and was a pioneer in the unification of natural forces since the 1950s, which eventually led to the standard model of elementary particles, for which he is one of the founders ( Electroweak Interaction , for which he received 1979 with Sheldon Lee Glashow and Steven Weinberg the Nobel Prize). But he was also active in the development of GUTs , supersymmetry and string theory from the 1970s, i.e. topics in physics beyond the standard model . He was the first Pakistani Nobel Prize winner and, after Anwar as-Sadat, the second Nobel Prize winner of the Muslim faith. He belonged to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community .
Life
Early years
Abdus Salam was born in Punjab as the son of Chaudhry Muhammad Hussain and his wife Hajira Hussain. His family belonged to the Ahmadiyya Muslim religious community. At the age of just 14, Salam had the highest grade point average ever recorded for enrollment at the University of the Punjab . Salam studied at the University of Punjab (Government College of Punjab, Lahore ) mathematics . His first publication followed in 1943, in which he gave an improved solution to a non-linear algebraic system of equations, which S. Ramanujan had already dealt with.
Start of the scientific career
In 1946 he managed thanks to a scholarship to Master Accounts. In the same year he received a scholarship to St John's College of Cambridge University and shifted its focus here on the field physics. In 1949 he achieved a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and physics with a "Double First-Class Honor". After graduating , he received his doctorate in theoretical physics under Nicholas Kemmer in 1952 . From the late 1940s he worked closely with Kemmer's doctoral student Paul Taunton Matthews on renormalization theory and accompanied him to Princeton University in 1949 . After completing his doctorate, he returned to Pakistan, where he taught at the State College of Lahore and then at the University of Punjab . Since he was scientifically isolated there, Salam decided to return to Cambridge, where he became a lecturer . In 1957 he became professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London . His PhD students at Cambridge include John Moffat and Robert Shaw (1955), who was the independent discoverer of the Yang Mills theory , and at Imperial College, the Israeli co-discoverer of the quarks Yuval Neeman (Imperial College, London, 1961), the mathematical physicist Ray Streater (1960), Ali Chamseddine , Christopher Isham , Robert Delbourgo (who became a close collaborator similar to John Strathdee), and Michael Duff .
ICTP
Disappointed with his experience at the Pakistani universities, Salam founded the International Center for Theoretical Physics ( ICTP ) in Trieste ( Italy ) in 1964 ; his native Pakistan had shown no interest in such a scientific institution. An important goal of this institution is to better support young scientists from developing countries. Salam became director of this institution and was an honorary member of the management from 1993 until his death. Today the center operates under the auspices of UNESCO and the International Atomic Energy Agency ( IAEA ).
A close collaborator in Trieste was John Strathdee , who worked with Salam from 1965 to 1993, including 32 years at the ICTP. They shared an office during Salam's stays at the ICTP and their typical collaboration was described in such a way that Salam, overflowing with ideas, “bombarded” Strathdee with his ideas during his visits to the ICTP, which Strathdee then examined and worked out with discipline and persistence.
Death and remembrance
Abdus Salam died of Parkinson's disease on November 21, 1996 at the age of 70 in Oxford , England . He was buried - without any official recognition - in Rabwah in the Bahishti Maqbara cemetery. As a believing member of the Ahmadiyya community, which is ostracized as non-Muslims within Pakistan , Salam has only been honored once by the Pakistani government as the country's first Nobel Prize winner: in 1979, when he was awarded the highest civil state medal by President Zia ul-Haq Nishan-i-Imtiaz was awarded. In contrast, his scientific influence was deliberately suppressed in his home country due to religiously motivated intolerance (in 1974 the Ahmadiyya were excluded from the Muslim community by a resolution of the Pakistani National Assembly). "First Muslim Nobel Laureate" (first Islamic Nobel Laureate) used to be read on his tombstone. Later, at the instigation of a local politician, the term “Muslim” was deleted, so that “First Nobel Laureate” is now on his tombstone.
In Pakistan, the Abdus Salam Center of Mathematical Sciences at Government College University in Lahore is named after him.
plant
In the 1950s he dealt with renormalization theory in quantum electrodynamics (QED), where, from his time in Cambridge, partly in collaboration with Matthews, he made progress on the difficult problem of overlapping divergences in the Feynman diagrams, a problem that Freeman Dyson in his proof of Renormalizability was still open. In addition, he determined further field theories, this time for particles of strong interaction (meson field theories), which can be renormalized according to the model of QED. Since many of the proposed theories could not be renormalized, other approaches to a theory of strong interaction were sought, for example via dispersion relations, and Salam made important contributions here too.
At about the same time as Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee , he proposed the parity violation of the weak interaction , which, however, was initially talked out of him by Wolfgang Pauli (as previously by Rudolf Peierls in Birmingham), which is why Lee and Yang first published the parity violation. Immediately afterwards he also presented a VA theory of the interaction of the neutrino with electrons and muons, as it was introduced shortly afterwards by Richard Feynman , Gell-Mann and Robert Marshak and Sudarshan more generally for the weak interaction of the hadrons . Even then, he developed ideas for a unified electroweak theory (which already used a Yang-Mills theory and heavy gauge bosons with spin 1), which at the time was based on the contradiction between gauge invariance and the mass of the unresolved before the discovery of the Higgs mechanism Vector calibration bosons failed. He worked with John Clive Ward . In 1963 he was involved in the development of the theories about spontaneous symmetry breaking (the co-inventor of the Higgs mechanism TWB Kibble was a colleague at Imperial College), for example in a work with Jeffrey Goldstone and Steven Weinberg (who was at Imperial College for a year), in which they proved the gold stone theorem. This theorem states that such a spontaneous break in symmetry is associated with the appearance of massless particles. The final, later SU (2) x U (1) theory of the electroweak interaction, for which he received the Nobel Prize, he developed in 1967 independently of Steven Weinberg. In 1979 the two scientists shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for this research with Sheldon Lee Glashow . In 1974, Salam and Jogesh Pati developed one of the first GUTs that are supposed to combine the electroweak with the strong interaction ( quantum chromodynamics ). In the 1974 paper with Pati, he also introduced préon models (and the name préon), i.e. models in which quarks and leptons are composed of more fundamental fermions. With John Strathdee in 1974 he was the first to introduce the concept of superspace into supersymmetry , as a space not only with the usual commuting coordinates, but also with anticommuting ones.
With Strathdee, he developed nonlinear representations of the Poincaré group in 1969 and treated solution methods for field theories with nonpolynomial interaction.
Awards
Salam has received numerous honorary degrees in his scientific career. He was a member of the Royal Society , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1971), the National Academy of Sciences (1979), the American Philosophical Society (1992) and the Pakistan Academy of Science ( Islamabad ).
| year | Award | comment |
|---|---|---|
| 1950 | Smith's Prize | Awarded by Cambridge University for the best contribution from a PhD student |
| 1958 | Hopkins Prize | Awarded by Cambridge University for the best contributions from 1957 to 1958 |
| 1958 | Adams Prize | Awarded by the University of Cambridge |
| 1961 | Maxwell Medal and Prize | The Maxwell Medal and Prize from the IOP was awarded for the first time |
| 1964 | Hughes Medal | Awarded by the Royal Society |
| 1968 | Atoms for Peace Award | Ford Foundation |
| 1976 | Guthrie Medal | An award from the Institute of Physics |
| 1978 | Royal Medal | Awarded by the Royal Society |
| 1979 | Nobel Price for physics | Awarded by the KVA . Thus Salam is the first Muslim scientist to receive a Nobel Prize. |
| 1979 | Albert Einstein Medal from UNESCO | |
| 1979 | Nishan-i-Imtiaz | Highest civil order in Pakistan |
| 1983 | Lomonosov gold medal | Awarded by the Russian Academy of Sciences |
Honorary doctorates
| year | university |
|---|---|
| 1957 | University of the Punjab , Pakistan |
| 1971 | University of Edinburgh , United Kingdom |
| 1979 | University of Trieste , Italy |
| Quaid-i-Azam University, Pakistan | |
| 1980 | Universidad Simón Bolívar , Venezuela |
| National University of Engineering, Peru | |
| Yarmouk University , Jordan | |
| University of Wroclaw , Poland | |
| Istanbul University , Turkey | |
| 1981 | Aligarh Muslim University , India |
| University of Maiduguri, Nigeria | |
| Guru Nanak Dev University, India | |
| Banaras Hindu University , India | |
| University of Chittagong, Bangladesh | |
| University of Bristol , United Kingdom | |
| 1982 | University of the Philippines , Philippines |
| 1983 | University of Khartoum , Sudan |
| Universidad Complutense de Madrid , Spain | |
| 1984 | City University of New York , United States |
| University of Nairobi , Kenya | |
| 1985 | National University of Cuyo, Argentina |
| National University of La Plata, Argentina | |
| University of Cambridge , United Kingdom | |
| University of Gothenburg , Sweden | |
| 1986 | University of Sofia , Bulgaria |
| University of Glasgow , United Kingdom | |
| University of Heifei, China | |
| City University London , United Kingdom | |
| 1987 | Panjab University , India |
| University of Colombo, Sri Lanka | |
| National University of Benin, Benin | |
| University of Exeter , United Kingdom | |
| Peking University , China | |
| 1988 | University of Ghent , Belgium |
| 1990 | National University of Tucumán, Argentina |
| Bendel State University, Nigeria | |
| 1991 | University of Dakar, Senegal |
| 1992 | University of Lagos, Nigeria |
Personal
Salam married the British biochemist Louise Johnson in 1968 . The couple had a son and a daughter.
See also
reception
literature
- Gordon Fraser: Cosmic Anger: Abdus Salam - The First Muslim Nobel Scientist . Oxford University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-19-920846-3
- A. Ali, Isham, Kibble, Riazuddin (Eds.): Selected papers of Abdus Salam . World Scientific, 1994
documentary
- Salam - The First ****** Nobel Laureate . By Anand Kamalakar. (2018).
Web links
- Abdus Salam. by the Marie Curie library. ICTP , accessed October 6, 2019 .
- Abdus Salam . Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat Germany
- Literature by and about Abdus Salam in the catalog of the German National Library
- Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1979 award to Abdus Salam (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Abdus Salam article in Pakistan Aleem's Weblog, Nov. 2006 (Eng.)
- ^ Gordon Fraser, Cosmic Anger, Oxford UP 2008
- ↑ Malcolm W. Browne: Abdus Salam Is Dead at 70; Physicist Shared Nobel Prize . In: The New York Times , November 21, 1996.
- ↑ Post Anti Qadiani Ordinance of 1984 ( Memento of March 18, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
- ↑ Isambard Wilkinson: Pakistan clerics persecute 'non Muslims' . In: Daily Telegraph , December 25, 2007.
- Jump up ↑ Loring W. Tu The Abdus Salam School of Mathematical Sciences in Pakistan , Notices AMS, 2011, No. 7
- ^ Salam Overlapping divergences and the S matrix , Physical Review, Volume 82, 1951, p. 217, Divergent integrals in renormalizable field theories , Physical Review, Volume 84, 1951, p. 426
- ^ Matthews, Salam: Renormalization of meson theories , Reviews of Modern Physics, Volume 23, 1951, p. 311
- ^ A Tribute to Abdus. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on July 3, 2011 ; Retrieved August 29, 2012 .
- ↑ Vector-axial vector structure
- ↑ Nuovo Cimento, Volume 5, 1957, p. 299
- ↑ Yang Mills theories were introduced in 1955 independently of Yang and Mills in the dissertation of Ronald Shaw at Salam
- ^ Salam, Ward Nuovo Cimento, 1959, p. 568, Nuovo Cimento, Volume 19, 1961, p. 165, Physics Letters, Volume 13, 1964, p. 168
- ^ Goldstone, Salam, Weinberg Broken symmetries Physical Review, Volume 127, 1962, p. 965
- ↑ Salam gives as the last step on the electroweak theory (simultaneously with Weinberg) his contribution Weak and Electromagnetic Interaction to N. Svartholm (ed.), Elementary Particle Theory, Proc. 8th Nobel Symposium, Almqvist and Wiksell, Stockholm 1968. See Salam, Gauge unification of fundamental forces, Reviews of Modern Physics, Volume 52, 1980, p. 529
- ↑ Pati, Salam Unified lepton hadron symmetry and a gauge theory of the basic interactions , Physical Review D, Volume 8, 1973, p. 1240, the same Lepton number as the fourth color , Physical Review D, Volume 10, 1974, p. 275
- ↑ Salam, Strathdee Supergauge Transformations , Nucl. Phys. B, Vol. 76, 1974, pp. 477-482
- ^ Salam Strathdee Nonlinear Realizations I. The Role of Goldstone Bosons , Phys. Review, Vol. 184, 1969, pp. 1750-1759.
- ^ Salam, Strathdee Momentum-Space Behavior of Integrals in Nonpolynomial Lagrangian Theories , Physical Review D, Volume 1, 1970, pp. 1212, 3296-3312
- ↑ Pakistan: Debasing Nishan-e-Imtiaz ( Memento of April 18, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), Opinion Maker
- ↑ Lomonosov Gold Medal (Russian)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Salam, Abdus |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Pakistani physicist and Nobel Prize winner |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 29, 1926 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Jhang, Pakistan |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 21, 1996 |
| Place of death | Oxford , England |