COSMIC ANGER This page intentionally left blank COSMIC ANGER Abdus Salam – the fi rst Muslim Nobel scientist by Gordon Fraser 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. 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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., www.biddles.co.uk ISBN 978–0–19–920846–3 (Hbk.) 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Contents List of illustrations vi Introduction vii Acknowledgements and sources ix Author’s note xii 1. A turban in Stockholm 1 2. The tapestry of a subcontinent 17 3. Messiahs, Mahdis and Ahmadis 29 4. A mathematical childhood 46 5. From mathematics to physics 65 6. The men who knew infi nities 86 7. Not so splendid isolation 103 8. ‘Think of something better’ 121 9. The arrogant theory 141 10. Uniting nations of science 156 11. Trieste 178 12. Electroweak 203 13. Quark Liberation Front 233 14. Demise 247 15. Prejudice and pride 266 Bibliography 291 Index 295 List of illustrations 1 Map of the early 20th-century Punjab 2 Salam’s family tree 3 Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the Ahmadis’ Promised Messiah 4 Abdus Salam’s father 5 Jhang elementary school 6 Abdus Salam, age 14 7 Main Hall, Government College, Lahore, interior view 8 Main Hall, Government College, Lahore, exterior view 9 New Court, St. John’s College, Cambridge 10 Fred Hoyle, Salam’s undergraduate mathematics tutor 11 Paul Matthews and Abdus Salam 12 Sir Muhammad Zafrullah Khan 13 Paolo Budinich and Wolfgang Pauli 14 John Ward and Abdus Salam 15 Salam and J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1965 16 Physics meeting, Trieste, 1960 17 The Scientifi c Council of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, 1964 18 Sigvard Eklund, Prince Raimondo of Torre e Tasso, and Salam at Duino Castle, Trieste 19 Trieste’s Piazza Oberdan, the fi rst home of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics 20 The formal opening of the new building of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, 1968 21 Aerial view of Miramare, Trieste 22 Paul Dirac at Trieste 23 At the Nobel Award ceremony, Stockholm, 1979 24 Salam with Seifallah Randjbar-Daemi, October 1996 Introduction ‘There is a tide in the aff airs of men, which, taken at the fl ood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries’ William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar. In his painstaking biography of Primo Levi, Ian Thomson writes ‘It is fantastically diffi cult to fashion a narrative out of the inchoate facts of someone’s life’1. It is even more diffi cult in a biography of someone like Abdus Salam, whose life spanned separate themes and diff erent worlds, making a traditional sequential chronicle impossible. Thus, and for another reason explained later, this book does not read like a diary. Science underpins the whole of our world and governs our life- style, but – remote and diffi cult in its mathematical form – has become a neglected branch of culture. Scientists who change our view of the cosmos are overshadowed by celebrities who superfi cially appear to contribute more to the tides that aff ect the aff airs of men. Abdus Salam was no such Cinderella scientist. As modern science advances, it becomes increasingly inaccessible to outsiders, and to put Salam’s contributions to physics in context needs a lot of groundwork. Although he will be remembered for the work in electroweak unifi cation that led to his Nobel Prize, he also tram- pled across a wide range of research topics, not always successfully. He published 275 scientifi c papers, of which the Selected papers of Abdus Salam collection2 includes 65. I cover only his most signifi cant successes and failures, and refer to a small subset of the selected 65. I have taken a much broader approach to his background as an Ahmadi Muslim in what was then British India. His assimilation into Western, and particularly British, life was so complete that his real life- space was little understood by his European colleagues, as their wide- spread use of the meaningless fi rst name ‘Abdus’ attests. To understand Salam needs an appreciation of his roots in the Islamic history of the Indian subcontinent, the tectonic movements that led to the creation of the Muslim nation of Pakistan, and his eventual excommunication viii Introduction as a heretic – not all Muslims would agree that Salam was the fi rst Muslim to earn a Nobel Science Prize. I fi rst saw Salam in 1962 at Imperial College, London, when he intro- duced the inaugural lecture of his colleague and friend, Paul Matthews, recently promoted to Professor of Theoretical Physics alongside Salam. I was attending the lecture simply to kill time between the end of the undergraduate day and what would come later. London in 1962 was an interesting place for a 19-year-old: I was one of the few people to have heard the embryonic Rolling Stones. The door of the lecture hall opened and gowned fi gures swept in – Salam, Matthews, Kemmer. A student in front of me turned round and declared to nobody in par- ticular ‘They ooze brilliance!’. My aimless undergraduate studies found a target. Several years later, I became a research student in Salam’s group at Imperial College, but had little contact with him as he was then spending most of his time at his newly created centre in Trieste. When I moved to science writing, he was continually helpful and constructive, unlike many others, who seemed to think that constant carping would boost their reputation. I came to admire his writing, remarkable for someone whose mother tongue was Punjabi, and whose scientifi c talks were often largely incomprehensible. At scientifi c meetings and conferences, like many others he insisted on cramming too much material into the allotted time, so that it would qualify for inclusion in the published proceed- ings. Salam’s prose was diff erent: measured and stately. He drew on a profound knowledge of science history, world aff airs, English litera- ture, and Muslim heritage, together with his own sense of destiny, and an uncanny ability to choose the right synonym. At a memorial meeting for Salam in November 1997 at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste – Abdus Salam’s creation – the centre was renamed in his honour. Salam was prima- rily a scientist, but science writer Nigel Calder recalled Salam’s other motives: his controlled fury – ‘cosmic anger’ – about the injustice of a world where lack of opportunity can handicap even the most gifted students; and his indignation at the decline of science in the heritage of Islam. It was a ‘wonderfully romantic story’ that needed to be told, of a young lad from a market town in the Punjab who became a leader of science and earned a Nobel Prize, but who also emerged as a champion of the world’s poor. Acknowledgements and sources Much important material is in the books Ideals and realities, selected essays of Abdus Salam, which ran to several editions and numerous translations. However, these anthologies include much repetition of episodes, view- points and anecdotes, even within each edition, and unfortunately their usefulness is often severely hampered by the lack of an index. Presentations at special events and at science-history seminars are another valuable source. Reading Salam’s contributions to these, one senses that he was leaving messages for his biographers. Salam was a very private man who, apart from his family, had few close contacts in whom he would confi de. This remoteness was accen- tuated (for me) by material on his early life in Urdu or Punjabi. However, his family and colleagues have collected information in English on Salam’s early days, much of it highly anecdotal, based on oral accounts. In these stories, Salam’s school and undergraduate achievements are usually given more prominence than his Nobel prize. In tracing Salam’s life, whether through the printed word or from those that knew him, certain episodes are repeatedly encountered, and have become embel- lished with retelling. This has spawned tributes and eulogistic websites that endow Salam with almost saintly status.