A unifying force (2024): an Abdus Salam documentary

[Music] in theoretical physics you need to have an ability to come up with ideas an ability to see the underlying structure of things what you're really trying to do is you're looking at the world around you and you're trying to see what is the invisible framework that could hold all of this together so there's a bit of a architecture Al knowledge like the structural Integrity of a building but there's also the aesthetic [Music] Beauty I think Professor Salam had both of those things I think theoretical physics needs both of those [Music] things a famous scientist once said that there are two kinds of Genius the first kind produced results of such devastating logic and Clarity they leave you feeling well I could have done that too the other group what he called The Magicians whose sources of inspiration are altogether more enigmatic and I think Salam belonged to this magic circle if you like there was always an air of Eastern mysticism about his [Music] ideas my father was born in Jung City and the house that he grew up in is still there very basic house no electricity no running water he worked by candl light so very very simple basic life the family knew from early on that my father was a particularly gifted child after father had finished secondary school he then went to Government College in theall up until he got his scholarship to come to Cambridge in 1946 then he went back to Pakistan but when he went back home there was nothing there for him no intellectual stimulation no libraries no books that was when he made that decision to leave and come back to the UK and that was a very very hard decision for him to leave his [Music] family the theoretical physics group was founded by Salam at Imperial College in 1957 and when he got the offer from Imperial his bosses in Cambridge weren't very happy cuz they wanted to keep him there so they made an attempt to do so but he ignored them and came to Imperial when he received the offer from Imperial to come and join them he was absolutely delighted it was a matter of great pride for him and he felt instantly that this is where he wanted to be this was one of the most exciting groups we had so many young talented people there was this general feeling that the world really was open to us I remember the first day I met him the head of the department told me to go along and knock on salam's door which I nervously did and remember although it was a warm day he had on a three bar electric fire and a college scarf around his neck and instead of allocating one topic for my PhD he gave three he had such a burgeoning of ideas he was like a Fark display and of of course a byproduct of fir displays is's a lot of smoke and so you never quite knew what always what was going on but he managed to create this sense of enthusiasm in one case I've been working on something for several months and I got a little bit stuck and I went to him and said ah you know I'm we're almost there I'm almost there I think it's probably going to work and he said Dear Boy we're not doing that at all there's this marvelous paper by gy and radik carti and that's where we're going to go so we learned to uh a avoid him until we had something concrete I've never come across anybody who made me think this is what I want to do if you have a creative mind there is place for you in theoretical physics I think that is the mark of a of a truly great physicist is that you give it all you have but you're not holding on to something so tightly that you're not able to let go when you find out that it's not realized in nature in many ways he exemplified this and said it's a creative field it's that attitude of let's think about it let's go for it perhaps it'll work and perhaps it won't and expect to be wrong you cannot Escape knowledge science is knowledge knowledge is knowledge whichever way it's acquired it's part of our culture this this is the scientific age you cannot Escape it no one in the East can no one in the West can this is the scientific age Salam always said that his um his reason for studying unity and symmetry was based in a religious feeling there is this emphasis in Islam on one single Unity underlying all of creation that was something that really drove Salam salam's Nobel prizewinning work was electro week unification this work was done at Imperial College in 1968 at the time we thought there were four fundamental forces in nature the strong and weak nuclear force the electromagnetic force and the gravitational force theists are not happy we having four different explanations for the universe we'd like like an all embracing equation that describes all the forces and what Salam did together with independently Weinberg and glashow was to unify two of those forces the weak nuclear force which is responsible for radioactivity and the electromagnetic force which is responsible for light electricity magnetism the difficulty in trying to unify these forces was was huge I mean it just seemed apparently impossible right you have forces that are very long range then you have this weak Force which is literally limited to the nucleus of an atom you have particle carriers that are absolutely massless and then you have some that are very very heavy so how could you possibly unify two things when one's heavy and the other's massless that was the dilemma and the answer turned out to be the higs Boone the higs bone was proposed by Peter higs in ' 64 and what Salam realized was that what higs had proposed was the answer to the problem of how to unify the two forces so it was a huge step in a nutshell that's what it is these two things which look completely diverse are actually the same force in different manifestations so together with wiberg and glasow Salam is responsible for the theory that we now believe explains the whole universe up to the gravitational force which is the next stage but every experiment that's ever been performed is is consistent with salam's standard model of partical physics many years later in 2012 I was lucky enough to be atern in the auditorium with only 200 people where they announc the discovery of the Hicks as a Layman I would now say I think we have it and I had the same feeling people were shouting and sometime crying and you know it was very very very very exciting unfortunately Salam was was not there to to enjoy it the feeling that I had at that time is hard to describe this is history for humankind [Music] forever going to Sweden and going to Stockholm in December was just the most memorable event possible and he was told you'll wear tales in the traditional style he said but that's not my National Dress can I wear my national costume and the authorities were slightly taken aback but they of course they agreed and that was part of his charm they couldn't say no to him he wore his National dress as a badge of honor it's almost iconic that picture of him when he won the Nobel Prize he was wearing a pgri which was the traditional turban that was worn for important ceremonies he wore the sherani which again was the national dress and the kusas the you know the shoes with the turned up uh edges so very Regal very formal and what I really admire about him is that he never lost lost touch with his own identity the first time that I left Pakistan I had that sense of being cut off from everything I had known before then and cut off from home that's when it struck me exactly how difficult it can be I mean how much more it would have been for him it made me realize how important it is to have mentors who come from similar backgrounds he is just a model that we can look to as a mentor and see how he navigated certain challenges and used them to figure out what we what we ourselves should [Music] do I feel that one of the reasons why the ictp was so successful is because it was started by someone who had been through these experiences himself he didn't want what happened to him to happen to others and propos the creation of this Center in trest which is called ictp International Center for theoretical physics the idea of this Center is to support scientist from developing countries so that they don't have to leave their country or leave the field the center was created not out of an intellectual need but out of a humanitarian need to give the best students from the developing countries the opportunity to come somewhere for three or six months in the year where they can meet the best intellectuals in their particular field they can be recharged energized by that interaction and then they can go back to their own countries and spread that knowledge further he thought that people bring in their own unique perspectives conditioned by their culture conditioned by the way they grew up and that's one of the reasons he thought that we need a diversity of physicists we need people from all over the world there was something going Beyond any political differences so we can have the scientists from Israel and from Palestine scientists from Pakistan and from India it's impressive to see how science get them together then when they see each other they realize that they're all the same and they they have the same values and the same interest for science he had this great vision and then it applied to science but also to humanity and and so some people say that in the same way that he received a Nobel Prize for unifying the electromagnetic and weak interaction he he should have received a Nobel Prize for unifying peoples of different cultures so in that sense it's hard to defy a figure that will have more impacting all science in all the world than Abdul Salam why we're still talking about him now 27 years after his death is because of that Legacy of trying to break down the barriers between the developed world and the developing World his Nobel work was a moment in time it was awesome but it was just a piece of work at the end of the day that would have been done by somebody what would not have been done by somebody is his work on development of Science and Technology techology in the developing World being here at Imperial where Abdus Salam would have walked these corridors and written on these blackboards and where he did so much of his influential work it's a very exciting place to be L than equal to Z to less than equal to ZN I do think for a lot of theoretical physicists it is a dream to have a fundamental description which includes all of the fundamental forces and particles we see you have this you'll have a tutorial there is something which will always be intriguing and mysterious about this theory that could describe everything it will always be a question it's always going to be up in the air and it's always going to be a driving force so in that sense there is no end to this uh you know journey of theoretical physics what I would like to see in the future is not a goal which is so related to D iCal physics it's more Broad in the sense of Science in general I would like to see on countries around the world put more of a focus on developing the infrastructure and opportunities available to people in these countries and to young children and to teenagers this is something that Salam actually was very conscious about because who knows what great minds are out there just waiting for the opportunity to arise [Music]

Channel: Imperial College London

Views: 95,509

Keywords: imperial, college, london, science, university, UK

Id: hye8dmpql9g

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 29 2024