Steven Weinberg died on July 23, 2021.
He was 88 and was still productive. Last year, two papers by him appeared in Physical Review D, "Models of lepton and quark masses" and "Massless particles in higher dimensions".
His contribution to physics was prodigious.
He will be most remembered for the work on electroweak unification. For that he shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics. It also sparked the hope that an overall unification is in sight.
For CENTRA, with its physicists working in astrophysics and gravitation, his 1972 book Gravitation and Cosmology is of great importance. Indeed, the book is outstanding from any perspective. It treats with an amazing flare all the difficult problems a student can encounter in the study of general relativity and is an inspiration. As an example, the paper "Gravitational radiation in D-dimensional spacetimes" by CENTRA members was based on Weinberg's approach to gravitational waves as given in the book.
His small book of 1973, The first three minutes, influenced a whole generation of particle physicists that turned their minds into cosmology, and is a book that every kid interested in science should read.
He took his doctorate in Princeton supervised by Tremain, afterwards he was in Harvard, and since 1972 he was professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Justin Feng, our colleague at CENTRA, had classes in quantum mechanics with him at Austin while doing the PhD there.
CENTRA is deeply sorry that he is not anymore around. His work will stay with us.