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| Credit: NobelPrizedotorg |
Few Pakistanis know what the Higgs boson is and even fewer realise that some of the earliest theoretical groundwork that led to this discovery was laid by Pakistan’s only Nobel laureate, Dr Abdus Salam.
The Higgs boson is a subatomic particle whose existence was confirmed by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (known by its French acronym, CERN) on July 4. The discovery of the particle provides the last remaining bit of empirical evidence necessary for the Standard Model of physics, which seeks to explain the existence of all forces in the universe except gravity.
From "The First Three Minutes-The First One-Hundredth Second, page 148: Despite the weakness of the weak interactions, it has long been thought that there might be a deep relation between the weak and electromagnetic forces. A field theory which unifies these two forces was proposed in 1967 by myself (Weinberg), and independently in 1968 by Abdus Salam.
International Herald Tribune:
Higg's boson: Pakistan's contribution to a major breakthrough
Nobel Prize in Physics, '79: Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, Steven Weinberg
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