Mohammad Abdus Salam (; 29 January 192621 November 1996) was a Pakistani theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate. He shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow "for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including, inter alia, the prediction of the weak neutral current". He was the first Pakistani, first Muslim scientist, and second person from any Muslim country (after Anwar Sadat of Egypt) to win a Nobel Prize.
Salam was scientific advisor to the Ministry of Science and Technology in Pakistan from 1960 to 1974, a position from which he played a major and influential role in the development of the country's science infrastructure. For this, he is viewed as the "scientific father" In 1974, Abdus Salam departed from his country in protest after the Parliament of Pakistan unanimously passed a parliamentary bill declaring members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, to which Salam belonged, non-Muslim. Salam heavily contributed to the rise of Pakistani physics within the global physics community. Up until shortly before his death, Salam continued to contribute to physics, and to advocate for the development of science in third-world countries.|name=birth He belonged to the Muslim Rajput community, his son Ahmad Salam later recounted that he would tell him stories of Rajput cultural history "of which he was very proud". Jagjit Singh, in his biography of Salam, says that his family traditionally traced its genealogy back to a Rajput prince named Buddahn who converted to Islam at the hands of a Sufi preacher and later founded the city of Jhang around the year 1160. Salam was the son of Chaudhary Muhammad Hussain, a school teacher of Jhang and Hajirah who belonged to Faizullah Chak near Batala.
thumb|[[St John's College, Cambridge, where Salam studied.]]
Salam established an early reputation in Punjab for outstanding academic performance. At age 14, he scored the highest marks ever recorded for the entrance examination of the Punjab University, earning a full scholarship to the Government College of Lahore. As a fourth-year student, he published an elegant solution for a mathematical problem originally studied by Srinivasa Ramanujan. In 1944, his mathematics exam results set a new Punjab record. Salam also excelled in Urdu and English literature, which could have led him to pursue further studies in English. However, on the recommendation of a mentor, he chose to continue with an M.A. in mathematics.
At his father's urging, Salam attempted to enter the Indian Civil Service (ICS), considered the most prestigious career path for young graduates. He applied to the Indian Railways but was rejected after failing the medical optical tests; examiners also ruled that he was too young to qualify. In 1950, he received the Smith's Prize from Cambridge University for the most outstanding pre-doctoral contribution to Physics. After finishing his degrees, Fred Hoyle advised Salam to spend another year in the Cavendish Laboratory to do research in experimental physics, but Salam had no patience for carrying out long experiments in the laboratory. His doctoral thesis titled "Developments in quantum theory of fields" contained comprehensive and fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics. By the time it was published in 1951, it had already gained him an international reputation and the Adams Prize.
During his doctoral studies, his mentors challenged him to solve within one year an intractable problem which had defied such great minds as Paul Dirac and Richard Feynman. He began to supervise the education of students who were particularly influenced by him. As a result, Riazuddin remained the only student of Salam who had the privilege to study under Salam at the undergraduate and post-graduate level in Lahore, and post-doctoral level in Cambridge University. In 1953, Salam was unable to establish a research institute in Lahore, as he faced strong opposition from his peers. Salam went back to Cambridge and joined St John's College. During 1957, his tenure at Imperial College, London started. As time passed, this department became one of the prestigious research departments that included well known physicists such as Steven Weinberg, Tom Kibble, Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, Riazuddin, and John Ward.
At Cambridge and Imperial College he formed a group of theoretical physicists, the majority of whom were his Pakistani students. At age 33, Salam became one of the youngest persons to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1959. and to whom he presented his research work on neutrinos. Oppenheimer and Salam discussed the foundation of electrodynamics, problems and their solution. His dedicated personal assistant was Jean Bouckley. In 1980, Salam became a foreign fellow of the Bangladesh Academy of Sciences.
Scientific career
Salam made an important and significant contribution in Particle physics. In his early career in Pakistan, Salam was greatly interested in mathematical series and their relation to physics. Salam had played an influential role in the advancement of nuclear physics, but he maintained and dedicated himself to mathematics and theoretical physics and focused Pakistan to do more research in theoretical physics. Salam had worked on the neutrino with his chiral symmetry. Salam later passed his work to Riazuddin, who made pioneering contributions in neutrinos. Salam introduced the massive Higgs bosons to the theory of the Standard Model, where he later predicted the existence of proton decay. In 1962, Salam published his theoretical work on the vector meson. In 1961, Salam began to work with John Clive Ward on symmetries and electroweak unification. In 1964, Salam and Ward worked on a Gauge theory for the weak and electromagnetic interaction, subsequently obtaining SU(2) × U(1) model. Salam was convinced that all the elementary particle interactions are actually the gauge interactions. In 1968, together with Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow, Salam formulated the mathematical concept of their work. While in Imperial College, Salam, along with Glashow and Jeffrey Goldstone, mathematically proved the Goldstone's theorem, that a massless spin-zero object must appear in a theory as a result of spontaneous breaking of a continuous global symmetry. In 1968, together with Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow, Salam finally formulated the mathematical concept of their work.
thumb|Abdus Salam at the Fifth International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP), 1955, Rochester
In 1966, Salam carried out pioneering work on a hypothetical particle. Salam showed the possible electromagnetic interaction between the Magnetic monopole and the C-violation, thus he formulated the magnetic photon.
Following the publication of PRL Symmetry Breaking papers in 1964, Steven Weinberg and Salam were the first to apply the Higgs mechanism to electroweak symmetry breaking. Salam provided a mathematical postulation for the interaction between the Higgs boson and the electroweak symmetry theory.
In 1972, Salam began to work with Indian-American theoretical physicist Jogesh Pati. Pati wrote to Salam several times expressing interest to work under Salam's direction, in response to which Salam eventually invited Pati to the ICTP seminar in Pakistan. Salam suggested to Pati that there should be some deep reason why the protons and electrons are so different and yet carry equal but opposite electric charge. Protons are composed of quarks, but the electroweak theory was concerned only with the electrons and neutrinos, with nothing postulated about quarks. If all of nature's ingredients could be brought together in one new symmetry, it might reveal a reason for the various features of these particles and the forces they feel. This led to the development of Pati–Salam model in particle physics.
Salam had worked on forces from 1959 with Glashow and Weinberg. Only one known official replica of the Nobel Prize Medal was ever produced by the Mint of Pakistan in 1979/80. This medal has a large test cut and damage from two to three o'clock. The replica medal was sold at auction to an unknown bidder on April 23, 2025. In the 1970s Salam continued trying to unify forces by including the strong interaction in a Grand Unified Theory.
Government work
thumb|right|Sign on the road named after Abdus Salam in [[CERN, Geneva]]
In 1961 he approached President Khan to set up the country's first national space agency, thus on 16 September 1961 the Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission was established, with Salam as its first director. In 1967, Salam became a central and administrative figure to lead the research in Theoretical and Particle physics. On the direction of Salam, Ishrat Hussain Usmani set up plutonium and uranium exploration committees throughout the country. In October 1961, Salam travelled to the United States and signed a space co-operation agreement between Pakistan and US. In November 1961, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) started to build a space facility – Flight Test Center (FTC) – at Sonmiani, a coastal town in Balochistan Province. Salam served as its first technical director.
While in the IAEA, Salam had consulted about the establishment of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), a research physics institution, in Trieste, Italy... Salam obtained permission from President Ayub Khan to set up the Karachi Nuclear Power Plant. Also in 1965, led by Salam, the United States and Pakistan signed an agreement in which the US provided Pakistan with a small research reactor (PARR-I). Salam had a long-held dream to establish a research institute in Pakistan, which he had advocated for on many occasions. In 1965 again, Salam and architect Edward Durell Stone signed a contract for the establishment of the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology (PINSTECH) at Nilore, Islamabad.
Space programme
In early 1961, Salam approached President Khan to lay the foundations of Pakistan's first executive agency to co-ordinate space research. According to Rehman, Salam's influence in nuclear development was diminished as late as 1974, and he became critical of Bhutto's control over science. As early as 1972–73, he had been a great advocate for the atomic bomb project,
In 1965, Salam led the establishing of the nuclear research institutePINSTECH. In 1965, the plutonium Pakistan Atomic Research Reactor (PARR-I) went critical under Salams' leadership. Salam travelled to the US and returned to Pakistan with scientific literature about the Manhattan Project, and calculations involving atomic bombs. At the meeting, only I. H. Usmani protested, believing that the country had neither the facilities or talent to carry out such an ambitious and technologically demanding project, whilst Salam remained quiet. A few months after the meeting, Salam, Khan, and Riazuddin, met with Bhutto in his residence where the scientists briefed him about the nuclear weapons program. After the meeting, Salam established the 'Theoretical Physics Group' (TPG) in PAEC. Salam led groundbreaking work at TPG until 1974.
An office was set up for Salam in the Prime Ministers' Secretariat by order of Bhutto. This marked the beginning of the TPG, reporting directly to Salam. The TPG, in PAEC, was assigned to conduct research in fast neutron calculations, hydrodynamics (how the explosion produced by a chain reaction might behave), problems of neutron diffusion, and the development of theoretical designs of Pakistan's nuclear weapon devices. Later, the TPG under Riazuddin began to directly report to Salam, and the work on the theoretical design of the nuclear weapon was completed in 1977. In 1972, Salam formed the Mathematical Physics Group, under Raziuddin Siddiqui, that was charged, with TPG, with carrying out research in the theory of simultaneity during the detonation process, and the mathematics involved in the theory of nuclear fission. Following India's surprise nuclear testPokhran-I – in 1974, Munir Ahmad Khan had called a meeting to initiate work on an atomic bomb. Salam was there and Muhammad Hafeez Qureshi was appointed head of the Directorate of Technical Development (DTD) in PAEC.
The DTD was set up to co-ordinate the work of the various specialised groups of scientists and engineers working on different aspects of the atomic bomb. Following the setting up of DTD, Salam, Riazuddin and Munir Ahmad Khan, visited the Pakistan Ordnance Factories (POF) where they held talks with senior military engineers led by POF chairman Lieutenant-General Qamar Ali Mirza. Salam remained associated with the nuclear weapons programme until mid-1974, when he left the country after Ahmadi were declared non-Muslims by the Pakistani Parliament. His own relations with Prime minister Bhutto fell out and turned into open hostility after the Ahmadiyya Community was declared as not-Islamic; he lodged a public and powerful protest against Bhutto regarding this issue and gave great criticism to Bhutto over his control over science. Although he had left the country, Salam did not hesitate to advise the PAEC and Theoretical and Mathematical Physics Group on important scientific matters, and kept his close association with TPG and PAEC.
Advocacy for science
In 1964, Salam founded the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste, in Italy and served as its director until 1993. In 1974, he founded the International Nathiagali Summer College (INSC) to promote science in Pakistan. The INSC is an annual meeting of scientists from all over the world who come to Pakistan and hold discussions on physics and science.
In 1997, the scientists at ICTP commemorated Salam and renamed ICTP as the "Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics". Throughout the years, he served on a number of United Nations committees concerning science and technology in developing countries.
In 1979, Salam said: Physicists believed there are four fundamental forces of nature; the gravitational force, the weak and strong nuclear force, and the electromagnetic force. Salam was a firm believer that "scientific thought is the common heritage of mankind", and that developing nations needed to help themselves, and invest in their own scientists to boost development and reduce the gap between the Global South and the Global North, thus contributing to a more peaceful world.
In 1981, Salam became a founding member of the World Cultural Council.
Although Salam left Pakistan, he did not terminate his connection to home. He continued inviting Pakistan's scientists to ICTP, and maintained a research programme for them.
Personal life
Abdus Salam was a very private individual, who kept his public and personal lives quite separate. At his death, he was survived by three daughters and a son by his first wife, and a son and daughter by his second, Professor Dame Louise Johnson, formerly Professor of molecular biophysics at Oxford University. Two of his daughters are Anisa Bushra Salam Bajwa and Aziza Rahman.
Religion
Salam was an Ahmadi Muslim,
In 1974, the Pakistan parliament made the Second Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan that declared Ahmadis to be . In protest, Salam left Pakistan for London. After his departure, he did not completely cut his ties to Pakistan, and kept a close association with the Theoretical Physics Group as well as academic scientists from the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. His body was returned to Pakistan and kept in Darul Ziafat, where some 13,000 men and women visited to pay their last respects. Approximately 30,000 people attended his funeral prayers.
Salam was buried in Bahishti Maqbara, a cemetery established by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community at Rabwah, Punjab, Pakistan, next to his parents' graves. The epitaph on his tomb initially read "First Muslim Nobel Laureate". The Pakistani government removed "Muslim" and left only his name on the headstone. It is the only nation to officially declare that Ahmadis are non-Muslim. The word "Muslim" was initially obscured on the orders of a local magistrate before moving to the national level. Under Ordinance XX of 1984, being an Ahmadi, he was considered a non-Muslim according to the definition provided in the Second Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan.