Mohammad Abdus Salam
1926–1996, Jhang, Punjab, British India (now Pakistan), Oxford, England, UK
Pakistani theoretical physicist who independently formulated the electroweak unification and founded the ICTP to support scientists in developing countries.
From a modest Punjabi family, Salam won a scholarship to Cambridge and became the first Pakistani Nobel laureate and the first Muslim to win the physics prize. Working at Imperial College with Tom Kibble and students, he arrived in 1967–68 at essentially the same electroweak model as Weinberg, explicitly including quarks. Equally consequential was his founding in 1964 of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, which became a lifeline for physicists across the developing world.
Nobel-winning work
Salam's share of the 1979 Nobel Prize recognized his independent formulation of electroweak unification. With John C. Ward he had pursued gauge models of the weak force since the late 1950s; in lectures and papers of 1967–68 he combined the SU(2)×U(1) structure with the symmetry-breaking mechanism, arriving at the same finite predictions for W and Z masses as Weinberg — and explicitly extending the model to hadrons.
The unified theory's triumphs — neutral currents, the charm requirement, and the W and Z discoveries at CERN — completed the second unification of forces after Maxwell's, earning Salam, Weinberg and Glashow the prize.
Workplaces: Imperial College London, International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste
Pakistan