Theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg passed away on July 23 at the age of 88.
In 1967, Weinberg published a brief two and a half page paper in Physical Review Letters, ‘A Model of Leptons’. This paper, Weinberg managed to demonstrate that the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces were different manifestations of the same underlying interaction, separating out into different forces as the universe cooled via a symmetry breaking process.
An important prediction of this new electroweak theory was the existence of weak neutral current processes, mediated by the Z boson, a prediction which was experimentally validated in 1973 by the Gargamelle experiment at CERN. For this discovery, Weinberg shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Sheldon S. Glashow and Abdus Salam.
Obituary by Frank Wilczek | Nature
Obituary by John Preskill and others | Physics Today
Nobel Prizes: to Glashow, Salam and Weinberg for Physics… | Physics Today
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1979 | The Nobel Foundation
The Discovery of Weak Neutral Currents | CERN Courier
Gargamelle | Wikipedia
Forty years of neutral currents | CERN Courier
Gargamelle: the tale of a giant discovery | CERN Courier
Twenty-five years of neutral currents | CERN Courier
