American theoretical physicist (1933-2021)
Steven Weinberg (born 3 May 1933 – 23 July 2021) was an American physicist. He was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics (with colleagues Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow) for combining electromagnetism and the weak force into the electroweak force.
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The Discovery of Subatomic Particles (1983; Revised edition 2003)
The last thirty years of Einstein's life were largely devoted to a search for a so-called unified field theory that would unify James Clerk Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism with the general theory of relativity, Einstein's theory of gravitation. Einstein's attempt was not successful, and with hindsight we can now see that it was misconceived. Not only did Einstein reject quantum mechanics; the scope of his effort was too narrow. ... Nevertheless Einstein's struggle is our struggle today. It is the search for a final theory.
As you will never be sure which are the right problems to work on, most of the time that you spend in the laboratory or at your desk will be wasted. If you want to be creative, then you will have to get used to spending most of your time not being creative, to being becalmed on the ocean of scientific knowledge.
Hertz showed... the... rays were not appreciably deflected by electrified metal plates. This seemed to rule out... electrically charged particles... Hertz concluded the rays were some sort of wave... the nature of light was... not well understood, and a magnetic deflection did not seem impossible. In 1891 Hertz made a further observation... to support the wave theory... The rays could penetrate thin foils of gold and other metals, much as light penetrates glass. ...We know now that... the... particles were traveling so fast, and the electric forces were so weak... the deflection was too small to observe.
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I decided to exclude material that was highly speculative... cosmological theory in higher dimensions... anthropic reasoning... holographic cosmology... conjectures about the details of inflation, or many other new ideas. ...The present book is largely concerned with ...mainstream cosmology: ...inflation driven by one or more scalar fields ...followed by a big bang dominated by radiation, , baryonic matter, and .
The years since the mid-1970s have been the most frustrating in the history of particle physics. We are paying the price of our own success: theory has advanced so far that further progress will require the study of processes at energies far beyond the reach of existing facilities. In order to break out of this impasse, physicists began in 1982 to develop plans for a scientific project of unprecedented size and cost, known as the Superconducting Super Collider.
[T]o extend this to the geometry of spacetime... include a term... in the spacetime line element, with <math>a</math> now an arbitrary function of time (known as the Robertson-Walker scale factor):<math>d\tau^2 \equiv -g_{\mu\nu}(x) dx^\mu dx^\nu = dt^2-a^2(t)[d\mathbf{x}^2 + K \frac{(\mathbf{x} \cdot d\mathbf{x}^2)}{1-K\mathbf{x}^2}]</math>
's kindness to me and my wife went beyond his help with this research. He had my wife and me to dinner at his house and at that dinner I went to the bathroom and I learned something about Källén that I don't think anyone knows. And that is that he had hand towels embroidered with the . And I mentioned this to Mrs. Källén and she said they were a present from Pauli.
A superconductor of any kind is nothing more or less than a material in which a particular symmetry of the laws of nature, electromagnetic gauge invariance, is spontaneously broken. ... These rotations act on a two-dimensional vector, whose two components are the real and imaginary parts of the electron field, the quantum mechanical operator that in quantum field theories of matter destroys electrons. The rotation angle of the broken symmetry group can vary with location in the superconductor, and then the symmetry transformations also affect the electromagnetic potentials ... The symmetry breaking in a superconductor leaves unbroken a rotation by 180°, which simply changes the sign of the electron field. In consequence of this spontaneous symmetry breaking, products of any even number of electron fields have non-vanishing expectation values in a superconductor, though a single electron field does not. All of the dramatic exact properties of superconductors – zero electrical resistance, the expelling of magnetic fields from superconductors known as the Meissner effect, the quantization of magnetic flux through a thick superconducting ring, and the Josephson formula for the frequency of the AC current at a junction between two superconductors with different voltages – follow from the assumption that electromagnetic gauge invariance is broken in this way, with no need to inquire into the mechanism by which the symmetry is broken.