A true giant ...

Dr. Steven Weinberg at the University of Texas at Austin. Though he had the respect, almost awe, of his colleagues for his scientific abilities, he also possessed a rare ability among scientists to communicate and explain abstruse scientific ideas to the public.Credit...Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

A physics giant died, Steven Weinberg, who found out the weak force and electromagnetism were actually the same, helped to create the Standard Model to determine, in part, how reality works.

There are four known forces in the universe: gravity; electromagnetism; the strong force, which binds the nuclei of atoms together; and the weak force, which causes radioactive decay. The first two forces have been known for centuries, but the other two were discovered only in the first two decades of the 20th century.

The radioactive beta decay is due to the weak interaction, 

which transforms a neutron into a proton, an electron, and an electron antineutrino.

Dr. Weinberg theorized that there was a link between the photon and the W and Z bosons, suggesting that they were created by the same force. The conclusion was that, at very high energy levels, the electromagnetic and weak forces were one and the same. It was a step on the path to the unified theory that physicists had been searching for.

Dr. Weinberg published his findings in 1967 in a groundbreaking paper, “A Model of Leptons,” in the journal Physical Review Letters. The article is one of the most cited research papers in history.

His philosophy regarding science and its connect to existence is profound and unsparing.

Dr. Weinberg opposed religion, believing that it undermined efforts to seek and discover truth. In “The First Three Minutes” he wrote, “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”

In his interview with the Nobel Institute, he was asked him about his often-quoted line near the end of “The First Three Minutes” — “The more that the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

“What I meant by that statement is that there is no point to be discovered in nature itself; there is no cosmic plan for us,” he said. “We are not actors in a drama that has been written with us playing the starring role. There are laws — we are discovering those laws — but they are impersonal, they are cold.”

He added: “It is not an entirely happy view of human life. I think it is a tragic view, but that is not new to physicists. A tragic view of life has been expressed by so many poets — that we are here without purpose, trying to identify something that we care about.”

A giant indeed.