Steven Weinberg (born May 3, 1933) is an American physicist. He and his colleagues, Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow, formulated the electroweak force theory that combines electromagnetism with the weak force. For this work, the three scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979.

He received his Bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 1954 and his Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University in 1957.

He is currently a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin.

Besides his scientific research, Stephen Weinberg has written and spoken on the conflict between scientific thinking and religious dogma, and on the dangers he views as inherent in religious thinking. In a speech given in Washington, DC, on April 1999 he declared:

"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

He is the author of the books Gravitation and Cosmology, The First Three Minutes, Dreams of a Final Theory, Facing Up - Science and its Cultural Adversaries and Quantum Theory of Fields (three volumes).

External links

• Steven Weinberg
• several articles by Weinberg on non-physical topics, written for a general audience, in The New York Review of Books