Professor Abdus Salam, the greatest Pakistani
scientist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979, died
this week six years ago. Apart from his numerous scientific
contributions, Salam was also a great institution builder, as
exemplified by the Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy
that he founded and directed.
Born in 1926 in Jhang, Salam
could well claim to be a child prodigy. At the age of 14, he made
history by scoring the highest marks ever recorded in the
Matriculation Examination of the University of Punjab. When it came
to going to college, Salam was clearly attracted by science and
mathematics.
The last six or seven decades of British rule
witnessed an extraordinary growth of science in the subcontinent.
Several scientists made their mark in different fields. Among them
were people like J. C. Bose, S. N. Bose, C. V. Raman, S. Ramanujan,
P. C. Ray, Meghnad Saha and S. S. Bhatnagar. It is likely that Salam
was inspired by some of them. Indeed his very first research
publication, done when he was only 16 years of age and an
undergraduate at Government College in Lahore, was about the work of
Ramanujan in Mathematics.
Like many of the leading scientists
of that period, Salam went to England to study. There again he was
extraordinarily successful and won many prizes and scholarships. His
1951 Ph.D. thesis contained fundamental work in the field of quantum
electrodynamics — which tries to explain the interactions between
light and matter in a manner consistent with the methods of quantum
mechanics — and gained him a formidable reputation.
The same
year he returned to Pakistan to teach mathematics at Government
College, Lahore, and in 1952 became head of the Mathematics
Department of Punjab University. But he was intellectually isolated
and found no opportunities to interact with fellow scientists. So
Salam returned to England where he became a lecturer at Cambridge
University. This was clearly not an easy decision for him and he
seemed to be trying to make amends for it forever.
If only
one cricketer had to be given credit for putting the West Indies on
the world map, it would have to be Learie Constantine. Constantine
did this by immigrating to England and making his mark as a great
bowler by playing in the English league. About this, the great West
Indian historian C. L. R. James writes: “if the West Indies cannot
afford to keep their great cricketers at home they don’t deserve to
have them. All the shouting and patting on the back of “our boys”
doesn’t mean a thing to me if it cannot be translated into a way of
life for them.”
Like Constantine, Salam cannot be faulted
for returning to the West. The tragedy is that this kind of
situation has persisted till today and many of the best and
brightest Pakistani students of science immigrate to the US for want
of adequate facilities or an intellectually stimulating environment.
This state of affairs also reflects the fact that government claims
about supporting science and technology really only pertain to
supporting things like nuclear weapons science and ballistic missile
technology.
It was during his second stint in England that
Salam made his greatest contributions to physics. By the 1930s
physicists had realised that there were four fundamental forces in
nature. The most familiar among these are gravity and the
electromagnetic force, both very apparent in daily life. The other
two are the weak and strong nuclear forces, both of which act only
at very short ranges, less than a billionth of a millimetre. The
first of these is responsible for radioactive decay.
Through
the work of a number of scientists in the 1960s, the possibility
that the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force were
closely related and could in fact be unified into one electroweak
force. Salam was an important contributor to this effort. It was for
their work on electroweak unification that Salam, along with Steven
Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow, was awarded the Nobel Prize.
While being deeply involved in such fundamental research,
Salam also found time to be involved in developing science and
technology in Pakistan. In the words of Ishfaq Ahmad, formerly the
chairman of Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, Salam is “one of the
main architects of whatever modern science exists in Pakistan
today.” He was appointed Chief Scientific Advisor to the President
of Pakistan and held this position from 1961 to 1974 when he
resigned from this position.
One suggested reason for this
resignation has been his opposition to the nuclear weapons programme
that was initiated by Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. There may
be a basis for that. Salam was part of a larger movement within the
scientific community that has been involved in raising awareness of
the dangers stemming from nuclear weapons. In 1988, Salam, along
with 26 other eminent scientists, put out a public petition to free
Mordechai Vanunu; Vanunu was an Israeli nuclear technician who was
imprisoned for having publicised Israel’s nuclear weapons
programme.
There was, however, a more serious and tragic
reason for his resignation. Salam was a member of the Ahmadiyya sect
and in September 1974 the Ahmadiyyas were declared non-Muslims in
Pakistan. This was a great blow for Salam personally but the harm
may have been greater. As Pervez Hoodbhoy explains, “1974 was the
first step down the steep slippery slope, the bottom of which is not
yet in sight. More and more Islamic sects and communities are facing
the threat of persecution and possible excommunication as the fires
of religious extremism burn ever higher.”
The tragedy
persists. On this anniversary of his death, it would be fitting
tribute to Salam not only to remember his great contributions but to
also remember his belief “that only liberal, tolerant, and
pluralistic societies can advance scientifically and culturally” and
work towards such a society.
