Abdus Salam

Youth and education Abdus Salam was born on 29 January 1926 in the Punjab Province of British Raj (present day in Pakistan) into a Punjabi family professing Ahmadi Islam. 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". As per Jagjit Singh in his biography of Salam, his family 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. , 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 Early in his career, Salam made an important and significant contribution in quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory, including its extension into particle and nuclear 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 theory of the neutrino – an elusive particle that was first postulated by Wolfgang Pauli in the 1930s. Salam introduced chiral symmetry in the theory of neutrinos. The introduction of chiral symmetry played crucial role in subsequent development of the theory of electroweak interactions. 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 1963, Salam published his theoretical work on the vector meson. The paper introduced the interaction of vector meson, photon (vector electrodynamics), and the renormalisation of vector mesons' known mass after the interaction. 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. 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. In 1973, Salam and Jogesh Pati were the first to notice that since Quarks and Leptons have very similar SU(2) × U(1) representation content, they all may have similar entities. They provided a simple realisation of the quark-lepton symmetry by postulating that lepton number was a fourth quark colour, dubbed "violet". Physicists had believed that there were four fundamental forces of nature: the gravitational force, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and the electromagnetic force. Salam had worked on the unification of these forces from 1959 with Glashow and Weinberg. While at Imperial College London, Salam successfully showed that weak nuclear forces are not really different from electromagnetic forces, and two could inter-convert. Salam provided a theory that shows the unification of two fundamental forces of nature, weak nuclear forces and the electromagnetic forces, one into another. 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==

, Geneva Abdus Salam returned to Pakistan in 1960 to take charge of a government post given to him by President Ayub Khan. From her independence in 1947 after the Partition of India, Pakistan has never had a coherent science policy, and total expenditure on research and development was only ~1.0% of Pakistan's GDP. Even the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission headquarters was located in a small room, and less than 10 scientists were working on fundamental physics concepts. Salam replaced Salimuzzaman Siddiqui as the Science Advisor, and became first Member (technical) of PAEC. Salam expanded the web of physics research and development in Pakistan by sending more than 500 scientists abroad. 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.. It was due to his effort that in 1965, Canada and Pakistan signed a nuclear energy co-operation deal. Salam obtained permission from President Ayub Khan – against the wishes of his own government functionaries – 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. Salam signed another agreement with the NASA which launched a programme to provide training to Pakistan's scientists and engineers. 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. During a visit to the Institute of Physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in 1979, Salam explained after receiving an award: 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, 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. Legacy Salam's work in Pakistan has been far reaching and regarded as highly influential. He is remembered by his peers and students as the "father of Pakistan's school of Theoretical Physics" as well as Pakistan's science. Salam was a charismatic and iconic figure, a symbol among them of what they were working or researching toward in their fields. Salam founded the Space Research Commission of and was its first director. His alma mater, Government College Lahore, now a university, has the Abdus Salam Chair in Physics and Abdus Salam School of Mathematical Sciences named after him. The Abdus Salam Chair was also established in his honour at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering in the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He made a significant contribution towards the 2012 success in the search for the Higgs boson. Salam has been commemorated by noted and prominent Pakistani scientists, who were also his students. Many scientists have recalled their college experiences. Ghulam Murtaza, a professor of plasma physics at the Government College University and student of Salam, wrote: When Dr. Salam was to deliver a lecture, the hall would be packed and although the subject was Particle Physics, his manner and eloquence was such as if he was talking about literature. When he finished his lectures, listeners would often burst into spontaneous applause and give him a standing ovation. People from all parts of the world would come to Imperial College and seek Dr. Salam's help. He would give a patient hearing to everyone including those who were talking nonsense. He treated everyone with respect and compassion and never belittled or offended anyone. Dr. Salam's strength was that he could "sift jewels from the sand". Ishfaq Ahmad, a lifelong friend of Salam recalls: Dr Salam was responsible for sending about 500 physicists, mathematicians and scientists from Pakistan, for PhD's to the best institutions in UK and USA. In 2020, a group of students belonging to the State Youth Parliament desecrated an image of Salam that was present at a college in Gujranwala, while chanting slogans against the Ahmadiyya Muslim community. This deliberate effort to stifle mention of Salam is attributed to Salam belonging to the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, who have faced state-sponsored discrimination since the 1970s. ==Documentaries on Abdus Salam==

;Salam – the film LLC started formally researching and developing a film on the science and life of Abdus Salam in 2004, two years after the producers had conceived of the idea. A fundraising teaser was released by Kailoola Productions to coincide with Salam's birth anniversary on 29 January 2017. The post-production phase of this documentary film, pending funding, is estimated at US$150,000. The film Salam: The First ****** Nobel Laureate, directed by the Indian-American documentary filmmaker Anand Kamalakar, was announced in 2018 and released on Netflix in October 2019. ;Abdus Salam Pilgrim Films released The Dream of Symmetry in September 2011. Their press release describes it as presenting "the extraordinary figure of Abdus Salam, who not only was an outstanding scientist but also a generous humanitarian and a valuable person. His rich and busy life was an endless quest for symmetry, that he pursued in the universe of physical laws and in the world of human beings." ==Honours==

Salam was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971, the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1979, and the American Philosophical Society in 1992. In 1997, scientists at ICTP renamed the institute as the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in the honour of Salam. Salam's services have been recognised in Pakistan, as his students have openly spoken and stressed the importance of Science and Technology in Pakistan. In 1999, per the recommendation of Ishfaq Ahmad, the Government of Pakistan led the establishment of the Abdus Salam Chair in Physics at the Government College University. On 22 November 2009, the director of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics gifted the original Nobel Prize Certificate to his alma mater. In 2011, GCU's Salam Chair in Physics held a one-day-long conference that was attributed to Abdus Salam. In 1998, the Edward A. Bouchet-ICTP Institute was renamed as the Edward Bouchet Abdus Salam Institute. In 2008, in an opinion piece, Daily Times called Salam "one of the greatest scientists Pakistan has ever produced". In 2015, the Academy of Young Researchers and Scholars, Lahore, renamed its library as the "Abdus Salam Library". In the town of Vaughan, Ontario, Canada, near the headquarters of the Canadian branch of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, of which Abdus Salam was a member, the community has named a street after him, 'Abdus Salam Street', while at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland there is 'Route Salam'. Additionally, there are two annual Abdus Salam science fairs, one held in Canada and the other in the US. Each is organised as a National event for young scientists from the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in an effort to motivate youth toward scientific endeavour. On 6 December 2016, Pakistan's prime minister Nawaz Sharif approved the renaming of Quaid-i-Azam University's (QAU) physics centre to the Professor Abdus Salam Center for Physics. It was also announced that the Professor Abdus Salam Fellowship will be established, which will include five annual fully funded Pakistani PhD students in the field of Physics in "leading international universities". In November 2020, English Heritage erected a blue plaque in Salam's honour in Campion Road, Putney, London, at the house that was his London home for almost 40 years. In June 2023, Imperial College, London announced the renaming of its Imperial College Central Library as the Abdus Salam Library. Awards and recognition in 1986 In 1979, Salam was awarded a third of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Glashow and Weinberg, 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. Salam is recipient of first high civil awards – Star of Pakistan (1959) and the Nishan-e-Imtiaz (1979) – awarded by the president of Pakistan for Salams' outstanding services to Pakistan. • Guthrie Medal and Prize (1976) • Sir Devaprasad Sarvadhikary Gold Medal (Calcutta University) (1977) In 1979, Riazuddin, Fayyazuddin and Asghar Qadir met with Salam, and presented the idea of creating an award to appreciate scientists, resident in Pakistan, in their respective fields. It was endowed by Asghar Qadir, Riazuddin and Fayyazuddin in 1980, and it was first awarded in 1981. The winners are selected by a committee (consisted of Aghar Qadir, Fayyazuddin, Riazuddin, and others) of the Center for Advanced Mathematics and Physics (CAMP), which administers the award. The Abdus Salam Shield of Honor in Mathematics was initiated by the National Mathematical Society of Pakistan to promote and recognize quality research in Mathematics in 2015. It was awarded for the first time in 2016. Contributions Salam's primary focus was research on the physics of elementary particles. His particular numerous groundbreaking contributions included: • two-component neutrino theory and the prediction of the inevitable parity violation in weak interaction; • gauge unification of weak and electromagnetic interactions, the unified force is called the "Electroweak" force, a name given to it by Salam, and which forms the basis of the Standard Model in particle physics; • predicted the existence of weak neutral currents, and W and Z bosons, before their experimental discovery • symmetry properties of elementary particles; unitary symmetry; • renormalization of meson theories; • gravity theory and its role in particle physics; two tensor theory of gravity and strong interaction physics; • unification of electroweak with strong nuclear forces, grand unification theory; • related prediction of proton-decay; • Pati–Salam model, a grand unification theory; • Supersymmetry theory, in particular formulation of Superspace and formalism of superfields in 1974; • the theory of supermanifolds, as a geometrical framework for understanding supersymmetry, in 1974; • Supergeometry, the geometric basis for supersymmetry, in 1974; • application of the Higgs mechanism to 'electroweak symmetry breaking'; • prediction of the magnetic photon in 1966; ==Institutes named after Abdus Salam and other named entities==

• Abdus Salam Centre for Physics (Department of Physics), Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan • Abdus Salam National Centre for Mathematics (ASNCM), Government College University, Lahore, Pakistan. • Abdus Salam Chair in Physics (ASCP), Government College University, Lahore, Pakistan. • Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy. • Abdus Salam School of Mathematical Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan • The Edward Bouchet Abdus Salam Institute (EBASI) • Abdus Salam Library at Imperial College London ==See also==