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Physics Fame

Steven Weinberg wins Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics
Physics Fame

Physicist Steven Weinberg, a long-time friend of ICTP, has received the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. The $3 million prize cites Weinberg's “continuous leadership in fundamental physics, with broad impact across particle physics, gravity and cosmology, and for communicating science to a wider audience".

Weinberg joins a group of distinguished past winners of the Special Prize, including Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Stephen Hawking, the CERN scientists who played a leading role in discovering the Higgs Boson, the LIGO Collaboration that detected gravitational waves, and the discoverers of Supergravity.

Weinberg has been a frequent visitor to ICTP. Most recently, he gave a lecture that was livestreamed to ICTP and the world to mark the 50th anniversary of his 1967 paper, “A Model of Leptons”, in which he presented his work on the unification of weak and electromagnetic interactions. The paper played a seminal role in the development of the Standard Model of particle physics. Together with ICTP founder Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow, Weinberg won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.

A recording of the livestream is available on ICTP's YouTube page.

ICTP's Marie Curie Library has a number of books written by Weinberg in its collection.

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