May 3, 1933 - Birth of Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979

American physicist Steven Weinberg was born in New York on May 3, 1933. He grew up in the New York neighborhood of the Bronx. The son of Jewish immigrants, much of his family perished in the German Holocaust.

As a child he learned chemistry with an inherited game. At Bronx Science School he began to excel in physics, especially after reading a popular book about the exciting idea that nature was based on simple but powerful laws.

Weinberg and Glashow met in their teens, when they attended the New York High School of Science in the Bronx, and they met at Cornell University, where they graduated in 1954. Weinberg did his doctoral studies at the Niels Bohr Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, and read thesis at Princeton University in 1957. He got a research position at Columbia University and at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and in 1967 he settled at the University of Berkeley in California, where he again coincided with Glashow .

In 1968 he was visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and during his stay he published in collaboration with Abdus Salam his formulation of a unified theory of weak electromagnetic and nuclear interactions, today known as "electroweak theory". Together with Glashow, he predicted the existence of so-called Intermediate Vector Bosons, which were detected experimentally in 1982. In 1973 he was a professor of physics at Harvard, and ten years later he moved to Austin, Texas. He is the author of a book on cosmology, titled Gravity and Cosmology (1972).

In 1979, together with Sheldon L., Glashow and Abdus Salam, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on elementary particles..