Steven Weinberg *57

A Nobel Laureate and Madison medalist, Steven died July 23, 2021, in Austin, Texas.

Born May 3, 1933, in New York, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Cornell in 1954, spent a year in Copenhagen at what was then the Institute for Theoretical Physics, and obtained a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton in 1957.

Steven held faculty appointments at Berkeley, Harvard, and MIT, and spent the majority of his career at the University of Texas, Austin.

Acknowledged as one of the world’s foremost theoretical physicists, Steven won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 for showing how to unify two of the principal forces of nature. He won lasting renown as a creator of an electroweak theory that unifies electromagnetism and the weak force that operates on the subatomic scale and is one of the four forces that govern the universe.

A cultured man fond of poetry and the theater, Steven gave attention to the philosophical and metaphysical aspects of the scientific quest, and speculated on the meaning of scientific discovery for human life and the human place in the universe.

Steven is survived by his wife of 67 years, Louise Goldwasser; and their daughter, Elizabeth. \

Graduate alumni memorials are prepared by the APGA.