Rashed’s View

This is a copy of Professor Abdus Salam’s Obituary that I wrote for the Bangladesh Observer in December 1996.

When one summer afternoon, a young boy of fourteen came cycling into the provincial town of Jhang in Punjab, which is now in Pakistan, he found that the whole town had turned up to greet him. He had just made the highest marks ever recorded in the matriculation examination of Punjab University, a performance he would repeat for every examination he took at that University. Thirty nine years later, the same young boy was cheered by the international scientific community and the Muslim world as the King of Sweden adorned Mohammed Abdus Salam with the Nobel Prize Medal. He is the first Muslim and the only Pakistani to win the prestigious prize. His passing on November 21^st due to heart failure, at his Oxford home, comes as a great loss to the scientific community, especially third world scientists for whom he had done so much, and to the Muslim world, of which he was the most prominent scientist of this century. He is survived by two sons and four daughters. He was given a simple burial, without official recognition, by his family, friends and well-wishers in Pakistan.

Mohammed Abdus Salam was born on 29^th January, 1926, to Chaudhury Mohammed Hussain, an official in the Department of Education in a poor farming district by the Chenab River, one of the most under-developed areas of a developing country. Although his “father had not taken scholarship as a profession, he was keen that I should succeed that way”. Every day, when Salam came home from school, his father would question him closely on what he had studied. After causing a national sensation with his matriculation examination results, Salam won a scholarship to Government College for his B.A. and later to Punjab University for his M.A., both in Lahore. Although the best jobs in Pakistan at the time were in the Civil Service, he decided to stick with academia and accepted the scholarship to study Mathematics. He was a very gifted student at Government College, and at the age of seventeen, he had his first publication. It was a remarkable contribution describing a better way to solve a set of coupled non-linear algebraic equations than the one found earlier by the Indian mathematical genius Srinivasan Ramanujan.

In 1946, after completing his M.A. in Mathematics at Punjab University, Abdus Salam was fortunate to win a scholarship to Cambridge University. In fact, Salam thought that his scholarship to Cambridge was “something of a miracle”. During the Second World War, many Indian politicians wanted to help the British war effort. One of them collected a fund of about £15,000, but the war ended before he could donate the money. So instead, he set up five scholarships for foreign education. Salam was one of five people who were selected, while he had simultaneously applied to Cambridge. “The same day I got the scholarship, 3^rd September 1946, I also had a cable saying that an unexpected vacancy had come up at St. John’s College (Cambridge University) – admissions were usually done much earlier – and could I come up that October?” Salam went. In the meanwhile, the benevolent politician died and his successor cancelled the scholarship, so that the four other students, who were supposed to go the following year, never made it. “In the end, all that effort to collect a War Fund, for buying munitions, ended up in one thing alone: to get me to Cambridge! One could call it a set of coincidences, but my father didn’t believe this. He had desired and prayed for this, and saw this – I think, rightly – as an answer to his prayers.”

At Cambridge, he had a brilliant undergraduate career in Mathematics and Physics, and in 1949, was awarded a B.A. Honours Double First Class in Mathematics and Physics. After a stint with experimental physics, for which he “just hadn’t got the patience,” he moved onto theoretical quantum electrodynamics (QED), which was still just in its infancy. He asked his advisor, Nicholas Kemmer to give him a problem to work on, who replied that all the fundamental problems of QED, that of removing the infinities (with the old theory, almost all calculations led to infinite answers, such as an infinite mass for the electron), had just been solved by Shin-ichiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, Richard Feynman and Freeman Dyson. Also, Paul Matthews, who was just finishing his Ph.D. at Cambridge, had nearly solved the same problems for meson theory, but may have some loose ends. “So I went to Matthews and I said, ‘Have you got any crumbs left?’” Matthews had proved renormalisability (the removal of the infinite results) only very approximately (upto first order), and he said that he would give Salam three months to extend the proof to a better approximation (a few higher orders), after which he would take it back, meaning that he would start working on it himself. Salam astonished Matthews by returning within the allotted time with more than that, he also had a solution to one of the outstanding difficulties, the problem of overlapping infinities. By making this important contribution to renormalisation, he was immediately recognised as a major figure in the field. He was awarded the Smith Prize by Cambridge University for this work, “the most outstanding pre-doctoral contribution to Physics”. Matthews took Salam on as a doctoral student, and although Salam finished his doctorate in less than a year, he and Matthews made many important contributions to the foundations of quantum field theory together.

Completing his Ph.D. Salam wanted to return to his homeland. After a few months’ visit to Princeton as a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, he was appointed a full professor at the Government College and chairman of the Mathematics Department at Punjab University in Lahore, at age 25. He wanted to start a research school there, but there was no tradition of doing any postgraduate work, and he found that research was even frowned upon. He had no access to journals, and “I certainly couldn’t put the journals on” a £700 yearly salary. The president of his university told him that he could forget about research and offered him a choice of three jobs: bursar, warden of a residence hall or president of the football club. “I chose the football club.” But three years of isolation and professional frustration drove him back to England. “You have to know what other physicists are thinking, and you have to talk to them. I feared that if I stayed in Lahore, my work would deteriorate. Then what use would I be to my country?” He was the only theoretical physicist in the country at the time. In 1954, he accepted the post of lecturer at Cambridge, where he could return to full fledged research. He had instant success and made many key advances in quantum field theory.

In 1956, at the age of thirty, Salam was chosen to found a Department of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College, London, and was elected Fellow of The Royal Society, Britain’s most prestigious association of scientists. He retired from the Imperial College on his birthday this year, after forty years of service. His most major contributions to theoretical physics started at about the time he joined this institution. His first was a two component theory of neutrinos, and the prediction of parity violation in weak interactions, followed by many contributions to symmetry of elementary particles, gravity theory and supersymmetry.

But, by far, his most brilliant contribution was the unification of the electromagnetic force with the weak nuclear force, for which he shared the Nobel Prize with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg, both of Harvard University, in 1979. One of the major efforts in theoretical physics is the unification of all the known forces. The Salam-Weinberg “unification was couched in the same mould as the unification which was wrought by James Clerk Maxwell, a Scotsman and one of the greatest physicists the world has ever seen, concerning the relation of electromagnetism and radiation. Maxwell … went on to assert that electromagnetism and radiation [optics] are united. Maxwell died very young [at forty] and did not live to see the great ideas being carried out in the laboratory… But this unification remains one of the greatest landmarks in the whole of physics.” After Maxwell unified electricity, magnetism and optics, collectively called the electromagnetic force, there were four separate known forces. The other three forces were Newton and Einstein’s gravitational force, and the more recently discovered (early this century) weak and strong nuclear forces. These are the forces that, when released, give atomic and nuclear bombs their energy. More than a hundred years after Maxwell, Salam and Weinberg showed that the weak nuclear force and Maxwell’s electromagnetic force were really two manifestations of the same force. This is one of the most significant advances in fundamental theoretical physics, and like Maxwell’s unification, will remain one of the greatest landmarks in the whole of physics.

Unlike Maxwell, Salam lived to see the experimental verification of his theory. Among the predictions of his electroweak unification (a name coined by Salam) are a new kind of neutral current which is somewhat like electric current without the charge, and three new particles, called the Z⁰ and W^± bosons (named after Satyendra Nath Bose, who developed the theory together with Einstein, while Bose was professor of physics at Dhaka University, in 1924). The first experimental evidence of the neutral currents came in 1973 from CERN, in Geneva and it was confirmed by an experiment at Fermilab. Just after the CERN experiment, “I still remember Paul Matthews and I getting off the train at Aix-en-Provence for the 1973 European Conference and foolishly deciding to walk with our rather heavy luggage to the student hostel where we were billeted. A car drove from behind us, stopped and the driver leaned out.” This was Paul Musset, one of the heads of the experimental group at CERN, who was not acquainted with Salam at the time. “He peered out of the window and said, ‘Are you Salam?’ I said ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Get into the car. I have news for you. We have found neutral currents.’ [He was on his way to announce it at the conference.] I will not say whether I was more relieved for being given a lift because of our heavy luggage or for the discovery of neutral currents.”

This experimental verification was enough for the Nobel Foundation to decide that Glashow, Salam and Weinberg deserved the coveted Nobel Prize, which comes with a substantial amount of money ($1.2 million this year). At the presentation ceremony of the Nobel Prize, which was established by Alfred Nobel (the inventor of dynamite) in his will, the physics prize is always awarded at the beginning . If the winner is a married man, then his wife escorted to the reception by the King of Sweden. When Abdus Salam received the prize in 1979, he turned up in Sweden with his two wives, causing some problems of protocol to arise. Salam was also dressed in the traditional Pakistani outfit of a sherwani and turban. The Nobel Foundation accorded him the courtesy of addressing him in Urdu throughout the ceremony.

In 1964, the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, was created. The idea for such an institute, as part of a United Nations University, was born in the minds of Einstein, Neils Bohr and Robert Oppenheimer after the Japanese nuclear explosions. The ICTP was an institution of higher learning originally run by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and now under the auspices of UNESCO. The institute can really be called Salam’s institute, because he conceived it as a place where men from all countries could work alongside some of the most distinguished minds of physics. He proposed its creation to the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1960, and saw it through to its inauguration in 1964. He was its director from the inception in 1964 till 1993, when his health started to fail him. He was made its president in 1994 and was succeeded by Professor Miguel Angel Virasoro, of Argentina, as director. The main purpose of the centre is to encourage professors and students from third world countries to come and spend a few weeks or months at Trieste, where they can catch up with the excitement of the latest physics and meet informally with the world leaders of the subject. Thus, never again should any able theorist feel the isolation Salam himself felt while he went back to Lahore. The centre at Trieste has grown to a sprawling network of buildings, and offers workshops in a vast range of subjects.

In 1983, Salam helped found the Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), of which he served as the first president. It was formally inaugurated in 1985 by the United Nations and the Secretary General, Mr. J. Perez de Cuellar. The aim of the TWAS is to recognise and support scientific excellence and encourage the pursuit of science in the Third World. Among the many ways he found to help Third World students was to donate all his award money, including the whole amount of his Nobel Prize, and the Atoms for Peace Award, to setting up funds for needy students. The Third World owes him a debt for all his efforts to help further science in this region.

Professor Salam was a legend in his own time. Among his multitude of awards and honorary degrees are the Doctor of Science from Cambridge University, Aligarh Muslim University and University of Chittagong. He was also a Fellow of the Bangladesh Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the Sitara-I-Pakistan in 1959, and the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, the highest civilian award in Pakistan, in 1979. Abdus Salam was known to be a devout Muslim, whose religion was not separable from his work or his daily life. “The Holy Quran enjoins us to reflect on the verities of Allah’s created laws of nature; however, that our generation has been privileged to glimpse a part of His design is a bounty and a grace for which I render thanks with a humble heart.”

All quotations are by Mohammed Abdus Salam.