One summer noon in
1940, Abdus Salam came cycling into Jhang, a country town in the
Punjab region of British India. The townspeople had lined the streets to
greet him because, at the age of 14, he had just made the highest marks
ever recorded in the matriculation examination of Panjab University.
The result was a national sensation, but nowhere more than in Jhang, which
had so little tradition in schooling.
From that moment,
Abdus Salam was public property. Scholarships were to relieve his
family of the cost of his further education, first at Panjab University's
Government College, Lahore, and later at St. John's College at Cambridge
University in England.
Salam was to
astonish the ablest men of his time and become a leader in theoretical
physics. Today, at 41, he is international property. He directs the new
International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, on
leave of absence from Imperial College of Science and Technology ,
University of London, an institution similar to the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT), in the United States. He is also chief
scientific adviser to the president of Pakistan and one of the "wise men "
entrusted by the United Nations (UN) with guiding the application of
science and technology to the global war on poverty. But such public
recognition says little about the man, or about his role in the world of
physics.
Of course, Salam had
been a child prodigy , but even his talents could have been stifled by
neglect in his corner of the world. The boy had been lucky in his family
circle, which has a long tradition of piety and learning. His father was a
minor official in the farming community along a tributary
of the mighty Indus River that gave India
its name. Each day, when the boy came home from school, his father would
question him closely on what he had studied. And if any other
encouragement was needed, his maternal uncle, a former Moslem missionary
to West Africa, supplied it.
As Salam's education proceeded, the
traditions of Islam were complemented in his mind by Western studies. He
read English literature as well as the Koran (sacred book of the
Moslems). His prime subject was mathematics, but that would not have
been sufficient to save him from the natural destiny of ambitious young
men in his country- entry into the civil service. World War II had put a
moratorium on new appointments, however, so, in 1946, he went to
Cambridge University to continue
his studies.
Cambridge captivated him, especially the
flower gardens of St. John's. Later he was to turn down a fellowship at
neighbouring Trinity College, considered the best college in Great
Britain, for aesthetic reasons - the Trinity grounds were not as
pleasing as those at St. John's. He became a wrangler (Cambridge's
traditional term for a first-class mathematician) without much
difficulty. Thereafter, Salam followed the advice of Fred Hoyle, the
cosmologist, and took a course in advanced physics. "Otherwise," Hoyle
told him, "you will never be able to look an experimental physicist in
the eye."
Salam did more than take a course, he became
a research student in experimental physics in the famous Cavendish
Laboratory of Cambridge University. That move could have been a mistake.
Salam was no good in the laboratory. He would get bizarre results in his
experiments and explain them by inventing a new theory. He importuned
the Cambridge theoreticians for something more to his taste. The rare
self-confidence and fastidiousness of the young scholar demanded that he
question the deepest qualities of nature.
To a Moslem mystic, Allah is to be sought in
eternal beauty. And for Salam, beauty comes through finding new, subtle,
yet simplifying patterns in the natural world. Anything that threatens
to confuse the issue seems to him ugly, filling him with an almost
physical revulsion and driving him to clean it away, much as one would
remove mud from a shrine.
His first major piece of research, done at
Cambridge, completed a vital cleaning operation to get rid of an
absurdity in physics. In previous theory, there was nothing to stop an
electron from having an infinite electric charge. With great insight,
physicists Julian Schwinger, Richard Feynman, and Freeman Dyson had
indicated how the difficulty could be overcome, but the complete
mathematical proof was lacking. That, Salam supplied.
During the period in which Salam has been active, since the late 1940s,
physicists have shredded matter into smaller and smaller pieces, and
have proposed new theories to explain them. In all the great advances,
Salam has been in the thick of the action. Three of his contributions
have been exceptionally important, and illustrate his quest for order.
The first had to do with parity -a theory of
physics concerning the symmetry between an event and its mirror image.
When a radioactive atom throws out an electron (beta particle) it also
ejects that most elusive of particles, the neutrino. Both particles spin
as they go, and the natural assumption was that the particles were just
likely to spin to the left as to the right. At a conference in Seattle,
Washington, in 1956, the Chinese-born American physicists Tsung Dao Lee
and Chen Ning Yang suggested that such parity of left and right might
possibly not be the case.
The startling proposal, which challenged a 30-year-old law on the
conservation of parity, nagged Salam as he flew back to England from the
Seattle conference. If the ugly, irregular idea of "parity non
-conservation" was to be tolerable at all, there had to be a beautiful
explanation for it. He recalled that no one had satisfactorily explained
why the neutrino had no mass. Any particle will tend to interact with
its own field and thereby resist acceleration which is what we mean by
mass. Salam saw that nature could dodge this outcome if the neutrino
spun only in one direction - in other words, if parity was violated.
More precisely, parity violation had to balance parity conservation
exactly. That would mean that of the electrons emerging with neutrinos
from radioactive cobalt-60 atoms, an average of three electrons would
spin one way to everyone that spun the other. By the time his plane had
landed in England, Salam had it all clear in his mind. Distinguished
colleagues mocked the idea. In 1957, Chien-Shiung Wu of Columbia
University in New York City performed the celebrated cobalt-60 experi-
ment that proved the violation of parity -God was left-handed, as
Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli put it. For every three electrons
spinning to the left, one spun to the right, just as Salam had
predicted.
But Salam, like many other physicists, was already after bigger game.
Could the bewildering variety of particles be elementary? Or, was it, as
Salam asked, that "some are more elementary than others?" The best thing
was to seek family groupings, enabling one to say that if one particle
exists, then others should exist with familial properties -similar but
not identical.
The breakthrough began in 1960, when
Yoshio Ohnuki of Nagoya University in Japan introduced the idea of
"unitary symmetry" that might exist among particles. It started with the
notion that most particles are made up of three entities which are
themselves related to one another. Salam was the first
non-Japanese physicist, perhaps in a sympathy of oriental minds, to
accept the idea. Thus Imperial College, where Salam was professor of
theoretical physics, became the centre of development of unitary
symmetry.
Salam and John Ward, a visitor to
Imperial College, used it in April, 1961 , to predict an eightfold
family of new particles having twice the spin of the proton, duly
discovered some six months later. A research student working with Salam,
Yuval Ne'eman from Israel, went on to show that the chief heavy
particles, including the proton and neutron, also formed an eightfold
family. About the same time, Murray Gell-Mann of the California
Institute of Technology came to the same conclusion. He used the
symmetry concept to predict a very strange particle - the omega minus
-and when that, too, turned up early in 1964, the unitary ideas were
established.
The next great advance came from American
theorists who extended the unitary symmetry idea to link up separate
families of heavy particles into a dynasty of 56 particles. But this
theory left out the crucially important ideas of relativity, which
omission launched Salam onto his third major contribution to science.
This time, working with two associates, Robert Delbourgo and John
Strathdee, Salam introduced Einstein 's "four dimensions" (three
dimensions of space, plus time) to arrive at a still higher pattern. "We
are never going to be surprised by the discovery of a new particle
again," Salam commented at the time. The earlier theory, leading up to
the omega minus, had flaws, and these were carried over into the new
theory, as Salam's fellow physicists were quick to point out. The fact
remains that the valid portions of the theory represent the highest
level of pattern-making in particle physics. As Salam puts it: "We have
now run out of indexes."
According to Moslem colleagues, physics,
for Salam, is a form of prayer. But he also treats physics as great fun.
He holds onto the problem in his mind like a dog with a bone, yet he
manages to remain relaxed. He pours out ideas in a continuous stream in
discussions with his colleagues. Occasionally, Salam is right -and then
his triumphant "I told you so!" might be irritating to anyone who
recalled the 99 others, voiced with equal conviction, that were wrong.
The intensity of feeling and humor that
goes into his theorizing were illustrated once when he was ill. "I'm
sorry ," he told a colleague, "I can't do physics now because I can't
shout back at you." Generally, Salam talks quietly, thoughtfully, and
fluently in a husky voice punctuated by laughter. But he always takes a
positive attitude to ideas. "Some theorists are nihilists," he
complains. "They are very good at showing where ideas are wrong, but
they do not offer anything in their place. I prefer to build." He thinks
more or less continuously about the patterns of nature and their
mathematical representation, looking for order and beauty. " A broken
symmetry breaks your heart." he says. He begins his day at 5 a.m. Like
the wise man in the proverb, he goes to bed early, too.
That, then, is the story of the scholarly
Punjabi boy who became an outstanding physicist. But there is another
Salam: the man of the world in the most modern sense, a man concerned
with the politics and organisation of science, and with the terrible
problems of poverty and backwardness in his homeland and in half the
world.
In 1947, while Salam was finding his
place in the unfamiliar world of Cambridge, the British dissolved their
Indian empire and the new Moslem nation, Pakistan, came into existence.
Four years later, at the age of 25, Salam went back to Lahore. He served
as teacher of mathematics at his alma mater, Government College (1951 to
1954), and head of the mathematical department at Panjab University
(1952 to 1954). He felt a duty to return home and work among and teach
his own people. The move turned out to be unfortunate, although Salam
did not give up easily. He spent three troubled years there before
professional frustration drove him back to England. Reluctantly, he went
down the "brain drain" which robs Asia of much of the talent that it so
urgently needs. But he resolved to do all he could to save other young
men from the "cruel choice" between homeland and profession.
At Lahore, the lack of facilities was the
least of his worries - a theorist, after all, works with plain paper or
a blackboard. But, 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. He dabbled fruitlessly in cosmology and the theory of
superconductors. "You have to know what other physicists are thinking,"
he says, "and you have to talk to them. I feared that if I 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.
Salam picked up the threads again with
instant success. In 1955, he was asked to serve as a scientific
secretary at the first Atoms for Peace Conference convened by the UN in
Geneva, Switzerland. Like many others on that famous occasion, Salam was
greatly moved and sensed the full strength of world science and its
power to work great wonders for the benefit of all men. Two years later,
he was chosen to found a department of theoretical physics at Imperial
College. He was also elected the youngest fellow of Britain's most
select association of scientists, the Royal Society.
Today, Salam is director of his
International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste. The possessive
"his" is correct. Abdus Salam conceived the centre as a place where men
from all countries could work alongside some of the most distinguished
minds of physics. As delegate from Pakistan, he proposed its creation to
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in J 960, and he was
himself appointed its first director in 1964. Advanced countries, such
as France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States, were
cool to the idea at first, but they could not resist the enthusiastic
support from developing countries that rallied behind Salam. The Italian
government provided the greater share of the money for the centre's
first four years, donated temporary premises and began work on a fine
new building at the coastal resort of Miramare.
The advance that established the centre
on the scientific stage and made it a magnet for the world 's physicists
was Salam 's effort, along with Delbourgo and Strathdee, in carrying the
unitary symmetry ideas forward. That work was announced within a few
months after the centre had opened in October, 1964.
The centre, which Salam envisions as the
first department of a UN university, provides a meeting place for
leading theoreticians of East and West. In 1965, for instance, Salam
arranged a year-long brain-storming session on the attempts to tame the
H-bomb -to produce useful power from the hot, heavy gas. Out of the
session, presided over by Marshall Rosenbluth, an American, and Raoul
Sagdeev, a Russian, came something like an international policy for
experimental work aimed at giving mankind access to an unlimited source
of power.
Closest of all to Salam's heart is the
centre's role in ending the loneliness of men working in the
academically underdeveloped countries. Never again should any able
theorist suffer the isolation that Salam himself felt when he went back
to Lahore. From Africa, Asia and Latin America, professors and students
come to spend a few weeks or months at Trieste, where they can "plug in"
to the current excitement of physics, sample the latest ideas, and, most
important of all, meet informally with the world leaders in the subject.
One device pioneered by Salam is already being taken up in other
institutions and has attracted special support from the Ford Foundation.
It is the "association" plan whereby selected theorists in developing
countries are given the privilege of coming to Trieste for three months
a year, with the centre paying all the expenses.
The winter at Trieste is the time when
many physicists come from the Southern Hemisphere during the summer
vacation of their universities. It is for the scientists a time for
renewal, an opportunity to communicate with kindred spirits. After
teaching for four years at the University of Santiago, Chile, Igor
Saavedra felt like "a squeezed lemon." He was tempted to accept a job in
London, but the centre at Trieste opened in the nick of time, keeping
Saavedra from joining the "brain drain." For East Europeans, Trieste is,
above all other considerations, the only place in the world where
effective collaboration is possible between the physicists of the East
and the West. Salam is also gratified that, through the centre,
important contributions to the subject by theoreticians from the
developing nations in Africa have begun to appear.
Salam presides benevolently over the
centre, aided by his deputy, Paolo Budini of Italy. Few of the visitors
can know what battles Salam has fought and goes on fighting to make sure
that the centre will survive.
In February, 1967, for example, he took
the night train to Vienna to talk the governors of IAEA into extending
the centre's life indefinitely. He did not succeed, and he did not
conceal his wrath. In former days, a Moslem warrior would draw his
sword; Salam unleashes his words. He subscribes to the Islamic tradition
that patience is a virtue only up to a certain point, that gentle
persuasion can be tried only for so long if you are striving for higher
goals.
Abdus Salam's name means, literally,
Servant of Peace. The ideal of human brotherhood cultivated in the
abstruse mathematics and broken English of the Trieste centre finds a
broader and plainer expression in Salam's work for the UN Advisory
Committee on Science and Technology. Twice a year, he and 17 other men
of learning spend 10 days together at one of the UN's centres -Geneva,
Switzerland; New York City; Paris, France; and Rome, Italy. They try to
specify ways in which scientific knowledge and technical skills can
hasten the advancement of that half of the world now living in poverty.
The UN committee has produced a "World
Plan of Action" for building up science and technology within the
developing nations and for transferring technical knowledge to countries
that desperately need it. The "wise men" have also named particular
technologies, such as desalination and the elimination of
disease-bearing insects, that need to be developed as fast as possible.
Each member has his special preoccupations and enthusiasms. Abdus Salam
is particularly interested in involving leading scientists of advanced
countries in the problems of world development.
On behalf of his own country, Pakistan,
he did just that in a memorable fashion in 1962. The magnificent
irrigation system built in the Indus Valley during the British era had
deteriorated. Many years of seepage from the great irrigation canals had
waterlogged huge areas of farmland, while evaporation from the soil had
caused salts to accumulate. When Salam explained the problem, the US
government sent leading scientists, agriculturalists, and engineers to
West Pakistan. After thorough studies, the team, led by Roger Revelle,
then director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at La Jolla,
California, and science adviser to the Secretary of the Interior, drew
up a plan of wells and pumps for draining the land and washing out the
salt. Several areas, each about a million acres in size are already
successfully under treatment west of Lahore. Over 30,000 farmers have
adopted this procedure, greatly increasing agricultural production in
West Pakistan.
President Ayub Khan of Pakistan appointed
Salam as his personal scientific adviser in 1961, and a close and
informal relationship has developed between them. Salam is frank about
the human impediments in Pakistan, as in many developing countries,
where scientists may proffer constructive suggestions, only to find them
ignored by the administrators or dismissed because of the lack of
resources to carry them out. Salam's most powerful colleague is Ishrat
Usmani, chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. The
commission has gone beyond its basic task of introducing nuclear power.
It seeks to encourage general excellence among Pakistani scientists.
In the words of Usmani, "Most of the
scientific effort in Pakistan is in a large measure due to Salam's
imagination and the weight of his personality. Salam is a symbol of the
pride and prestige of our nation in the world of science."
At the same time, Salam confesses that
too little attention has been paid to food and agriculture and he is
understandably prone to pessimism. In a forecast of the future, he has
written: "Twenty years from now the less- developed countries will be as
hungry, as relatively undeveloped, and as desperately poor, as today. "
Yet he recognises slow progress in some directions. In Pakistan, the
undue esteem given to the arts, at the expense of science, is being
broken down. The president himself has come to share Salam's passionate
interest in the publication of better science textbooks. More young
people are studying science at the universities.
Since childhood, when he watched the
apothecary at Jhang concoct aromatic sherbets from the ancient book of
Avicenna, the Persian philosopher-physician, Salam has taken a proud
interest in the former glories of Islamic science and literature. He
likes to recall the days when Baghdad and Moorish Toledo were, for a
time, the world's chief centres of learning. Even today, his vision of
the future of Pakistan is not confined to the satisfaction of material
needs. "Once a nation starts to think of higher things, " he says,
"scholars must find a role in that society. " During his visits to
Pakistan, it is not unusual to find him surrounded by a group of poets
reading their verses to him and finding him an appreciative and critical
listener .
In keeping with strong Islamic tradition, "Charity begins at home", no
young Pakistani seeking help or guidance from Salam is left unaided. His
Western students, too, find him generous to a fault in his support of
them.
Salam is frequently on the move from
continent to continent, yet unlike many of today's jet set scientists he
refuses to let public business deflect him from his personal researches.
Conversely, in his advisory work in Pakistan and for the UN, he does not
allow his scientific sophistication to dampen the simple passion) of a
man born in a poor community and who knows that he is perhaps the
luckiest of all his countrymen.
On the wall of the director's office in
Trieste, hangs an inscription of a 16th-century Persian prayer: "He
cried: 'O Lord, work a miracle!' Salam's strength is that he believes
miracles are possible provided one goes out and helps them on their way.
