Abdus Salam: A Review of the Italian Edition of "Ideals and Realities"

Ideals and Realities:
A Review of the Italian Edition

Review published in Corriere della Sera, 6 August 1986, of the Italian translation of the first edition of Ideals and Realities (Ideali e Realta, translated by Vincenzo Gatti, published by Edizioni Lint, Trieste, 1986).

Courtesy: C.H. Lai, editor, IDEALS AND REALITIES: SELECTED ESSAYS OF ABDUS SALAM, (Singapore: World Scientific; 2nd ed. 1987), pp. 327-328

Prof. Abdus Salam

Salam, Physics Nobel Laureate, Inspired by the Quran

It is difficult to find pages as vibrant with human warmth, religiousness, political and moral duty and scientific depth, as in a recent collection of articles (larger than the English edition) of Abdus Salam "Servant of Peace", which is the literal translation of his name, entitled Ideals and Realities (Ed. lint, Trieste, Italy). Perhaps the Thoughts of the Difficult Years of Einstein may be able to produce the same emotions in the reader.

Having to say it schematically, one may say that the Physics Nobel Laureate Salam is at the same time two persons who combine only rarely; but when they do, they produce a miracle of humanity. Abdus Salam is a scholar and a sage. As a scholar, that is, as a scientist, he is the last great follower of an ancient tradition of physicists, for whom the intellectual scope of science is the unification of the laws of nature consisting of a few principles, to a grand unification of only one principle. In this search of the "arche", which began in Greece, and continued in Islam (Al Biruni sustained that nature has the same laws everywhere, on Earth as on the Moon), and materialised with the encounter of these two civilisations beginning with modern science, from Galileo to Einstein, Salam has made a fundamental contribution with the electroweak theory for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1979.

As a sage, Salam is again two things: he is a man profoundly religious who finds in the Quran the justification and the best reason for his scientific work, and he is a politician, in the highest and noblest sense of this degraded term, who places all his energy in improving the living condition

of the Third World. Whoever has had the opportunity of meeting him and listening to him, knows that he often refers to poets and to the Holy Book in order to give strength to his ideas.

The following splendid verse of the Quran could then be the seal of the sage:

"Though all the trees on earth were Pens
    And the Sea was Ink
    Seven seas, after, to replenish it,
    Yet would the words of the Lord be never spent,
    The Lord is Mighty and All Wise. "

Another verse of Omar Khayyam which he often cites gives an idea of the commitment of Salam, the man of action:

"Ah love! could thou and I with fate conspire
    To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire
    Would not we shatter it to bits -and then
    Remould it nearer to the heart's desire ".

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