Cosmic anger: Abdus Salam - the first Muslim Nobel scientist

320 Pages·2008·1.51 MB·English

by  Gordon Fraser

COSMIC ANGER
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COSM IC
ANGER
Abdus Salam – the fi rst Muslim Nobel scientist

by
Gordon Fraser
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
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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
c osmos 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. On the other hand, the
enemies of the Ahmadi sect to which he belonged produce some hos-
tile invective. Some Salam anecdotes are corroborated in one direction,
but refuted elsewhere. It is sometimes diffi cult to know who or what to
believe. Part of the problem stems from Salam having been an avid sto-
ryteller who could spin a good yarn and refashion episodes to suit his
needs: there are examples in this book.
For the history and sociology of the Indian subcontinent, I leaned on
the authority of Percival Spear and on Peter Hardy’s the Muslims of British
India. Lawrence Ziring’s Pakistan in the twentieth century was my primary
guide to the turbulent politics of this new nation. On the scientifi c side,
two key sources for the broad picture of twentieth-century physics are
Abraham Pais’ Inward bound and The second creation by Robert Crease and
Charles Mann. Pais’ book is a masterpiece, but is curiously telescoped
the wrong way in time, his narrative accelerating and becoming more
sketchy as time advances. Crease and Mann take a complementary
tack, and fl esh out their story with a wealth of contemporary detail.