GOUAMID Messaoud

​Youth and education​ : Abdus Salam was born on 29 January 1926 in Santokdas in the Sahiwal District (but grew up in Jhang), to Chaudhry Muhammad Hussain and Hajira Hussain, into a Punjabi Rajput family which converted to Islam in the 12th century (his own grandfather, Gul Muhammad, was a religious scholar apart from being a physician).[19] Salam's father was an education officer in the Department of Education of Punjab State in a poor farming district. Salam's family had a long tradition of piety and passion for learning.

At age fourteen, Salam scored the highest marks ever recorded for the matriculation examination at the Punjab University. He won a full scholarship to the Government College University of Lahore, Punjab State. Salam was a versatile scholar, interested in Urdu and English literature in which he excelled. But he soon picked up Mathematics as his concentration. Salam's mentor and tutors wanted him to become an English teacher, but Salam decided to stick with Mathematics As a fourth-year student there, he published his work on Srinivasa Ramanujan's problems in mathematics, and took his B.A. in Mathematics in 1944. His father wanted him to join Indian Civil Service. In those days, the Indian Civil Service was the highest aspiration for young university graduates and civil servants occupied a respected place in the civil society. Respecting his father's wish, Salam tried for the Indian Railways but did not qualify for the service as he failed the medical optical tests because had Salam worn spectacles since an early age. The results further concluded that Salam failed a mechanical test required by the railway engineers in order to gain a commission in Indian Railways, and moreover that Salam was too young to compete for the job. Therefore, Indian Railways rejected Abdus Salam's job application. While in Lahore, Abdus Salam went on to attend the graduate school of Government College University. He received his M.A. in Mathematics from the Government College University in 1946.[18] That same year, he was awarded a scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge, where he completed a BA degree with Double First-Class Honours in Mathematics and Physics in 1949. In 1950, he received the Smith's Prize from Cambridge University for the most outstanding pre-doctoral contribution to Physics. After finishing his degrees, Fred Hoyle advised Salam to spend another year in the Cavendish Laboratory to do research in experimental physics, but Salam had no patience for carrrying out long experiments in the laboratory. Salam returned to Jhang, Punjab (now part of Pakistan) and renewed his scholarship and returned to the United Kingdom to do his doctorate.
He obtained a PhD degree in Theoretical Physics from the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. His doctoral thesis contained comprehensive and fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics. By the time it was published in 1951, it had already gained him an international reputation and the Adams Prize. During his doctoral studies, his mentors challenged him to solve within one year an intractable problem which had defied such great minds as Dirac and Feynman.[24] Within six months, Salam had found a solution for the renormalisation of meson theory. As he proposed the solution at the Cavendish Laboratory, Salam had attracted the attention of Bethe, Oppenheimer and Dirac.

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Academic career: After his doctorate in 1951, Salam returned to the Government College University as a Professor of Mathematics where he remained till 1954. During the same period, he was the Chairman of the Department of Mathematics, and professor as well, at the University of the Punjab. As he became the chairman, Salam sought to update the university curriculum, making a course of Quantum mechanics as a part of undergraduate course. This was soon reverted by the Vice-Chancellor, and Salam decided to teach an evening course in Quantum Mechanics outside the regular curriculum. While Salam had mixed popularity in the university, he began to supervise the education of students who were particularly influenced by him. As a result, Riazuddin remained the only student of Salam who has the privilege to study under Salam at the under-graduate and post-graduate level in Lahore, and Post-doctoral level in Cambridge University. In 1953, Salam was unable to establish a research institute in Lahore, as he faced strong opposition from his peers.[35] In 1954, Salam took fellowship and became one of the earliest fellows of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences. As a result of 1953 Lahore riots, Salam went back to Cambridge and joined St John's College, and took a position as a professor of mathematics in 1954. In 1957, he was invited to take a chair at Imperial College, London, and he and Paul Matthews went on to set up the Theoretical Physics Department at Imperial College. As time passed, this department became one of the prestigious research departments that included well known physicists such as Steven Weinberg, Tom Kibble, Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, Riazuddin, and John Ward.
In 1957, Punjab University conferred Salam with an Honorary doctorate for his contribution in Particle physics. The same year with help from his mentor, Salam launched a scholarship programme for his students in Pakistan. Salam retained strong links with Pakistan, and visited his country from time to time.At Cambridge and Imperial College he formed a group of theoretical physicists, the majority of whom were his Pakistani students.
In 1959, he became one of the youngest to be named Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 33.Salam took a fellowship at the Princeton University in 1959, where he met with J. Robert Oppenheimer and to whom he presented his research work on neutrinos. Oppenheimer and Salam discussed the foundation of electrodynamics, problems and their solution.His dedicated personal assistant was Jean Bouckley. In 1980, Salam became a foreign fellow of the Bangladesh Academy of Sciences.



Scientific career: Early in his career, Salam made an important and significant contribution in quantum electrodynamics, quantum field theory, quantum chromodynamics, including its extension into particle and nuclear physics. In his early career in Pakistan, Salam was greatly interested in mathematical series and their relation to physics. Salam had played an influential role in the advancement of nuclear physics, but he maintained and dedicated himself to mathematics and theoretical physics and focused Pakistan to do more research in theoretical physics.[24] Though, he regarded nuclear physics (nuclear fission and nuclear power) as non pioneering part of physics as it had already "happened".[24] Even in Pakistan, Salam was the leading driving force in theoretical physics in Pakistan, with many scientists he continued to influence and encourage to keep their work on theoretical physics.[24] Salam had a prolific research career in Theoretical and High-energy physics, and either he pioneered or was associated with all the important developments in this field.[45] Salam had work on theory of the neutrino —an elusive particle that was first postulated by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930s. Salam introduced Chiral symmetry in the theory of neutrinos. The introduction of Chiral symmetry played crucial role in subsequent development of the theory of electroweak interactions.[46] Salam later passed his work to Riazuddin, who made pioneering contributions in neutrinos. In 1960, Salam carried the work on nuclear physics, where he had pioneered the work on proton decay. Salam introduced the induction of the massive Higgs bosons in the theory of the Standard Model, where he predicted the hypothetical form of radioactive decay emitted by Protons, thus he theorised the existence of proton decay. In 1963, Salam published his theoretical work on the vector meson. The paper introduced the interaction of vector meson, photon (vector electrodynamics), and the renormalization of vector meson's known mass after the interaction.[47] In 1961, Salam began to work with John Clive Ward on symmetries and Electroweak unification.[48][49] In 1964, Salam and Ward worked on a Gauge theory for the weak and electromagnetic interaction, subsequently obtaining SU(2) × U(1) model. Even though, the work in this was continued in 1959, Salam had deeply convinced that all the elementary particle interactions are actually the Gauge interactions.[50] In 1968, together with Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow, Salam formulated the mathematical concept of their work. While in Imperial College, Salam, along with Glashow and Jeffrey Goldstone, mathematically proved the Goldstone's theorem, that a massless spin-zero object must appear in a theory as a result of spontaneous breaking of a continuous global symmetry.[50] In 1960, Salam and Weinberg incorporated the Higgs mechanism, into Glashow's discovery, giving a it a modern form in electroweak theory, thus theorised the Standard Model.[51] In 1968, together with Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow, Salam finally formulated the mathematical concept of their work.

In 1966, Salam carried out the pioneering work on a hypothetical particle. Salam showed the possible electromagnetic interaction between the Magnetic monopole and the C-violation, thus he formulated the magnetic photon.[52]
Following the publication of PRL Symmetry Breaking papers in 1964, Steven Weinberg and Salam were the first to apply the Higgs mechanism to electroweak symmetry breaking. Salam provided a mathematical postulation while observing the interaction between the Higgs boson and the electroweak symmetry theory.[53]
In 1972, Salam began to work with Indian-American theoretical physicist Jogesh Pati. Pati wrote to Salam several times expressing interest to work under Salam's direction, in response to which Salam eventually invited Pati to the ICTP seminar in Pakistan. Salam suggested to Pati that there should be some deep reason for which the protons and electrons are so different and yet carry equal but opposite amount of electricity. Protons carry quarks, but the electroweak theory was concerned only with the electrons and neutrinos, with nothing postulated about quarks. If all of nature's ingredients could be brought together in one new symmetry, it might reveal a reason for the various features of these particles and the forces they feel. This led to the development of Pati-Salam model in particle physics.[54] In 1973, Salam and Jogesh Pati were the first to notice that since Quarks and Leptons have very similar SU(2) × U(1) representation content, they all may have similar entities.[55] They simply provided the simplest realisation of the quark-lepton universality by postulating that "Lepton number is the fourth colour.[56] Physicists believed that there are four fundamental forces of nature; gravitational force, strong and weak nuclear force, and the electromagnetic force. Salam had worked on the unification of these forces from 1959 with Glashow and Weinberg at the Imperial College. Salam was highly convinced that weak nuclear forces are not really different from electromagnetic forces, and two could inter-convert. Salam provided a theory that shows the unification of two fundamental forces of nature, strong and weak nuclear forces and the electromagnetic forces, one into another.[45] From 1959, Salam had searched for such unity that takes place in them. In 1966, Glashow had formulated the same work, and the theory was combined in 1966. In 1967, Salam proved the theory mathematically, and finally published the papers. For this achievement, Salam, Glashow, and Weinberg were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979.