Abdus Salam - The Miracle Scientist of Pakistan

In the conditions of modern life, the rule is absolute; the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed….Today we maintain ourselves, tomorrow science will have moved over yet one more step and there will be no appeal from the judgement which will be pronounced…..on the uneducated. (Alfred North Whitehead (1))

Abdus Salam is known to be a devout Muslim, whose religion does not occupy a separate compartment from his work and family life. He once wrote, “The Holy Quran enjoins us to reflect on the verities of Allah’s created laws of nature; however that our generation has been privileged to glimpse a part of the design is a beauty and a grace for which I render thanks with a humble heart. (Miriam Lewis, (2), see n.1)

Abdus Salam was a rare phenomenon of nature. He was born in 1926 in Jhang, a nondescript backdrop in Pakistan’s countryside, and rose to gain distinction of winning not only the Nobel Prize in Physics, in 1979, but also numerous other recognitions worldwide. In this respect, he was nothing less than a miracle of nature.

His academic career as a student was star-studded. He set a new university record in the Matriculation examination when he was only 14 years old. He completed his M.A. at the Government College, Lahore, in 1946 and won a scholarship to study at St. John’s College, Cambridge University. He was only 17 years old, in the fourth year at Government College, when he published his first paper. “It was an ingenious improvement on the solution of an algebraic problem discussed earlier by the Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan,” (3).

He passed his B.A. (honors) at St. John’s with a double First (wrangler) in mathematics and physics, in 1949. He received Smith’s Prize from Cambridge in 1950 for the most outstanding pre-doctoral contribution to physics. He obtained his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1952.

He then returned to Pakistan to teach at his alma mater and continue research in his chosen field (n.2). Finding his line of work was largely unappreciated and encountering difficulties for pursuing a meaningful career, he returned to Cambridge to teach, in 1954, in the position of a lecturer. Commenting on his sad plight in Pakistan, Nigel Calder (4) wrote, “..the academic climate in Pakistan was wrong; science was ignored not only by the intellectual leaders of the new nation, but also by the brightest students. Salam, simply, was intellectually lonely….I feared if I (Salam) stayed in Lahore my work would deteriorate. Then what use would I be to my country? Better to be a lecturer in Cambridge than a professor in Lahore.”

In 1957, he received appointment from Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, as a professor of theoretical physics and his career took off to a fruitful fulfillment.

Salam made his name in the scientific world early on while he was still working for his Ph.D. He extended the application of the renormalization method that Schwinger, Feynman, Dyson, and independently Tomonaga had previously proposed and for which they were honored by the award of Nobel Prize. For a fuller description of Salam’s contribution (elimination of overlapping infinities), see n3.

His next significant work was in regards to parity violation (destruction of symmetry). It was generally believed that the parity was conserved; the particles and their mirror images were as likely to be ‘left handed’ as ‘right handed.’ See n.4.

Salam hypothesized that “all neutrinos are left handed,” which called for violation of parity in the weak interactions. This was against the grain of the contemporary conventional wisdom. Duff (5) described Salam’s visit to the ‘formidable’ Wolfgang Pauli to try his hypothesis on him. According to him, “..he submitted (or should I say humbly submitted) his two-component neutrino idea. Pauli sent him packing unceremoniously with the jibe that the young man does not realize the sanctity of parity! So Salam delayed publication until after Lee and Yang had conferred the mantle of respectability on parity violation.” After the parity violation in the weak interactions had been experimentally verified by (Chien-Shiung) Wu’s group and independently by Leon Lederman’s group, Pauli wrote, “Now after the first shock is over, I begin to collect myself. Yes, it was very dramatic, “ (6).

The work that really distinguished Salam from his contemporaries was his unification of the electro-weak force for which he shared the 1979 Nobel Prize with Glashow and Weinberg. Tom kibble (3) paying tribute to Salam wrote that Salam’s work “..culminated in the discovery in 1967 of the electro-weak theory, showing how the electro-magnetic force responsible for most of chemistry and atomic physics, and the weak force manifested in radioactive decay, can be seen as part of a unified symmetric structure.”

To some people, Salam’s genius was a kind of mystery. His approach to the problems that he worked on could be illusive and not self-evident. Duff (5) wrote, “I think it was Hans Bethe who said that there are two kinds of genius. The first group (to which I would say Steven Weinberg belongs) produce results of such devastating logic and clarity that they leave you feeling that you could have done that too (if only you were smart enough). The second kind are the ‘magicians’ whose sources of inspiration are completely baffling. Salam, I believe, belonged to this magic circle and there was always an element of eastern mysticism in his ideas that left you wondering how to fathom his genius.” Similar views were expressed by the world-renowned Cambridge Cosmologist, Fred Hoyle, also.

Founder of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)

Salam was acutely conscious of the backwardness in the field of science and technology of the third world, particularly the Islamic world, to which he belonged. At the same time, he was profoundly proud of his glorious heritage also on which the western world later erected the edifice of the modern science. He also knew that merely commiserating on the plight of the third world countries was unrewarding; something concrete needed to be done to found a tradition of scientific research in the third world. He used his influence at the United Nations to get help for founding a research center of physics in the third world. He wanted to establish this center in Pakistan. According to Dr. Munir Ahmed Khan (7), “The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) scientific advisory committee which included Nobel Laureate Rabi and Homi Bhaba unanimously opposed it. Privately Bhaba wanted this center to be at Bombay and offered Salam to join him. Salam refused.” The proposal for Pakistan fell through when President Ayub Khan’s government could not come up with one million dollars required as the seeding money. Eventually, the center went to Italy at Trieste, Salam being its founding director. Had it come to Pakistan, a very healthy tradition of scientific research would have been planted there.

Salam was very sensitive and painfully aware of the backwardness of the Muslim world in science and technology. Like any responsible and caring member of the ummah, he wanted to change all this. On one occasion, he (1) wrote, “I can still recall a Nobel Prize Winner in Physics from a European country say this to me some years ago: Salam, do you really think we have an obligation to succor, aid, feed, and keep alive those nations who have never created or added an iota to man’s stock of knowledge? And even if he had not said this, my own self-respect suffers a shattering hurt whenever I enter a hospital and reflect that almost every potent life-saving medicament of today, from penicillin upwards, has been created without our share of input from any of us from the Muslim world.”

So, he wanted to change the existing situation for better by inviting the budding scientists from the third world, and funding their stay at the ICTP, to work not only on fundamental research but also on the applied research. Many promising scientists benefited from Salam’s center. But unless such a center and similar others in other areas of science and technology are created within the third world itself, the real impact will not be felt.

You Can Always Tell the Truth

Duff described an interesting anecdote in his “Tribute to Salam” lecture, which reveals a glimpse of Salam’s personal character. One of Salam’s students was enmeshed in a dilemma in his work. He was getting two different sets of results from his calculations. One of these sets seemed irrelevant to him while he liked the other set. Faced with this problem, the student sought help from Salam. He said, “Professor Salam, these calculations confirm most of the arguments I have been making so far. Unfortunately, there are also these other calculations which do not quite seem to fit the picture. Should I also draw the reader’s attention to these at the risk of spoiling the effect or should I wait? After all they will probably turn out to be irrelevant.”

Salam said in response, “When all else fails, you can always tell the truth.”

Poh’nchi Waheen Yeh Khak Jahan Ka Khameer Thha

(This dust returned to the place from where it had originated)

Professor Salam died on November 21,1996. He had developed a degenerative neurological disorder that made his life increasingly difficult. According to Kibble (3), “He bore the affliction with remarkable stoicism, continuing to work so long as he was physically able, on new ideas both in theoretical physics and for third world development. He died peacefully at his home in Oxford. He had six children, four by his first wife and two by his second.”

Many friends, colleagues, and students paid tribute to their departed friend and mentor. Dr. Munir Ahmed Khan wrote, “My last meeting with Salam was only three months ago (August 1996, author). His disease had taken its toll and he was unable to talk. Yet he understood what was said. I told him about the celebration held in Pakistan on his seventieth birthday. He kept staring at me. He had risen above praise. As I rose to leave he pressed my hand to express his feelings as if he wanted to thank everyone who had said kind words about him.”

Inna lillahay wa inna alaihay raj’aun.

Concluding his obituary, Dr. Munir Khan wrote, “Professor Salam had deep love for Pakistan in spite of the fact that he was treated unfairly and indifferently by his own country. It became more and more difficult for him to come to Pakistan and this hurt him deeply. Now he has returned home finally, to rest in peace for ever in the soil that he loved so much. May be in the years to come we will rise above our prejudice and own him and give him, after his death, what we could not when he was alive.”

I hope so too.

Honors and Awards

The world conferred numerous honors and awards on Professor Salam. Scores of universities from the third world, Europe, and America gave him honrary D.Sc.’s. He was knighted by the Queen of the United Kingdom and he received similar honors from several other countries as well.

He became a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), London, at the age of 33. He was honored by the award of Atoms for Peace, Einstein medal, J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial medal, Hughes medal of the Royal society, among many other honors. Pakistan honored him with the award of Sitara-e-Pakistan, the Pride of Performance medal, and the Order of Nishan-e-Imtiaz, which is the highest civilian honor. India honored him making him an honorary Fellow of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay. The ICTP renamed itself as the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics after Salam’s death, in his honor.

Indira Gandhi invited Salam to India when he received the Nobel Prize, in 1979. He said he would visit Pakistan first. Pakistan invited him as a state guest. Dr. Munir Khan (7) reported, “Once while visiting Beijing, I was told that the Chinese Academy hosted a dinner in his honor which was to be attended by the prime minister. However, breaking all protocol, the President also decided to attend the dinner just to honor Salam.”

He was Scientific Advisor to the government of Pakistan during President Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan’s time. He continued in this position shortly in Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s time also.

I saw Professor Salam a few times at Imperial College when I was a student there (1968-70). I met him in his office for a few minutes for some personal business. In my own professional circles, I sensed that my respect had increased a wee bit because of Professor Salam, he being my compatriot.

(Aasman teri lahd par shabnam afshani karay)
(May the Heaven sprinkle dew on your grave)

Postscript – Excerpts from Professor Abdus Salam’s Nobel Lecture, 8 December 1979

Seven hundreds and sixty years ago, a young Scotsman left his native glens to travel south to Toledo in Spain. His name was Michael, his goal to live and work at the Arab Universities of Toledo and Cordova, where the greatest Jewish scholar, Moses bin Maimoun, had taught a generation before.

Michael reached Toledo in 1217 AD. Once in Toledo, Michael formed the ambitious project of introducing Aristotle to Latin Europe, translating not from the original Greek, which he did not know, but from the Arabic translation then taught in Spain. From Toledo, Michael traveled to Sicily, to the Court of Emperor Frederick II.

Visiting the medical school at Salerno, chartered by Frederick in 1231, Michael met the Danish physician, Henrick Harpestraeng – later to become Court Physician of King Erik Plovpenning. Henrick had come to Salerno to compose his treatise on blood-letting. Henrick’s sources were the medical canons of the great clinicians of Islam, Al-Razi and Avicenna, which only Michael could translate for him……………………& #8230;….

In respect of this cycle of scientific disparity, perhaps I can be more quantitative. George Sarton, in his monumental five-volume History of Science chose to divide his story of achievement in sciences into ages, each age lasting half a century. With each half century he associated one central figure. Thus 450 BC – 400 BC, Sarton calls the Age of Plato, this is followed by half centuries of Aristotle, of Euclid, of Archimedes, and so on. From 600 AD to 650 AD is the Chinese half century of Hsiian Tsang, from 650 to 700 AD that of I-Chang, and then from 750 AD to 1100 AD – 350 years continuously – it is the unbroken succession of the Ages of Jabir, Khwarizmi, Razi, Masudi, Wafa, Biruni and Avicenna and then Omar Khayam – Arabs, Turks, Afghans and Persians – men belonging to the culture of Islam. After 1100 appear the first Western names: Gerard Cremona, Roger Bacon – but the honors are still shared with the names of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Moses Bin Maimoun, Tusi and Ibn Nafi – the man who anticipated Harvey’s theory of circulation of blood…….

Notes

n.1. Miriam Lewis was on the staff of the ICTP. However, she was at IAEA when she wrote a short biography of Professor Salam.

n.2. The head of Salam’s institute (Government College?) told him that though he knew Salam had done some research, he could forget about it. He offered Salam a choice of three jobs: bursar, warden of a hall of residence, president of the football club. I (Salam) chose the football club. (This was probably additional faculty duty? author).

Excerpted from, “An Interview with Dr. Abdus Salam, New Scientist, 26 August 1976.

n3. The story of Salam’s contribution to the renormalization theory is fully described by Robert P. Crease and Charles C. Mann (8) in their book “The Second Creation.” This rather detailed excerpt, which makes Salam narrate his contribution, is from that book.

“I went to (Paul) Matthews and I said, “What have you been up to?” He said he had spent two and a half years trying to renormalize meson theories. He had found that only spin zero mesons would work. “This was encouraging: the pion has a spin of zero. “He had done the calculations to one-loop order and shown that the theory of spin zero was renormalizable up to the second order. Matthews said to me that I should read Dyson and look at the general problem of renormalization of meson theories. Following Dyson, in a couple of days I produced a general scheme of renormalizing all meson theories of spin zero.”

That quickly?

“Very quickly, “ Salam said chuckling. “I went to Matthews and I said: Look, is this the problem?” He laughed and he said, “This is not the problem. You’ve done dimensional analysis, which only shows that various factors fit and everything would be fine – if one can show that the infinities really can be removed, each to its proper place. That’s the problem. The problem devolves to a rather obscure point in Dyson’s papers about overlapping infinities. It’s so obscure we really have to work on that. “In complicated interactions, the reaction can go more than one way along the tangle of loops and vertexes to the graphs. The question was whether each subinfinity had to be removed individually, as if the others were not present. Dyson claimed to have solved this for quantum electrodynamics, but had not given his proof. In the meson theory, Matthews had encountered even more virulent snarls of infinities, many of which overlapped in a vicious manner. Would Dyson’s claim hold for these also? Matthews said, “I’m taking vacation. You can have this problem until I come back to work in October. If you don’t solve it till then, I’ll take it back.” That was the sort of gentleman’s agreement we had. This was probably April or May, 1950.

Salam produced the solution before the stipulated time. Paul Matthews was incidently Salam’s supervisor at St. John’s College and later a colleague at the Imperial College.

n.4. Particles have a quantum mechanical property of parity. According to quantum mechanics, the conservation of this parity is equivalent to the laws of physics being invariant under mirror reflection. It has been found that parity is not conserved in the weak force and so the weak force is not invariant under mirror reflection.

http://www.en.wiki pedia.org/Wiki/Parity

References

1.(Quoted by) Abdus Salam, “The Future of Science in Islamic Countries,”part of a paper for inclusion in a volume presented to the Islamic Summit held in Kuwait, January 1987.
2.Miriam Lewis, “Abdus Salam – Biography,” http://www. nobel-se/physics/laureate/1979/salam-bio.html
3.Tom Kibble, “Emeritus Professor Abdus Salam, Nobel Laureate,” Staff Newspaper of Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, 3-16 December, 1996, Obituary.
Kibble was Salam’s colleague and collaborator at Imperial.
4.Nigel Calder, “A Man of Science – Abdus Salam,” in “The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics,” ed. Timothy Ferris, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1991, p. 670.
5.M.J. Duff, “A Tribute to Abdus Salam,” An after-dinner talk delivered at the Workshop on Frontiers in Field Theory, Quantum Gravity, and String theory, Puri, India, 12-21
December, 1996.
Duff was one of Salam’s graduate students at Imperial College.
6.Krishna Myneni, “Symmetry Destroyed: The Failure of Parity,” http://www. ccreweb.org/documents/parity.html
7.Munir Ahmed Khan, “Salam Passes into History,” The News International, Sunday, November 24, 1996, Page 7, Opinion.
8.Robert P. Crease and Charles C. Mann, “The Second Creation – Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth Century Physics,” Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, pp. 234-35.