Forgotten hero

Abdus Salam was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg for what is known as the ‘Glashow-Salam-Weinberg theory of electroweak forces’. However, due to religious prejudice his name has been consigned to oblivion, and many in the younger generation hardly know of him. Having attended lectures of the great Nobel Laureate PAM Dirac, Salam decided to pursue a PhD in physics at Cambridge University. There a senior PhD student, PT Matthews, gave Salam a difficult problem on the condition that if Salam failed to solve it in six months, Matthews would take it back. Salam took merely six weeks to solve the problem and became famous overnight. He returned to Pakistan after spending time at Princeton and was appointed professor of mathematics at the Punjab University (PU) as well as Government College (GC), where he continued working till the end of 1953.

In January 1957, he was appointed professor and head of the theoretical physics department at the Imperial College. In the same year, Salam published his two-component neutrino theory. In 1959, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, and was awarded the Sitara-e-Pakistan and the Presidential Pride of Performance Award. In 1967, he presented his work on electro-weak unification for which he won the 1979 Physics Nobel Prize. In the same year he was awarded the Nishan-e-Imtiaz. In 1961, Ayub Khan had appointed Salam as Chief Adviser to the President of Pakistan and he founded Suparco. By then, Salam was already a member of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC). He was also involved with the atomic bomb project initiated by Bhutto. However, in 1974, he resigned from all the afore-mentioned positions after the 2nd Aendment was passed. Despite that, he remained in contact with the PAEC leadership till the end of the nuclear program. He died of supra-nuclear palsy on November 21, 1996 and is buried in Chenab Nagar next to his parents.

Mujahid Kamran

Lahore