Two of Abdus Salam's long-time colleagues reminisce about the founder and the driving force behind the ICTP.

Abdus Salam:
The Man and the Mission

ICTP's founder and Nobel Laureate Abdus Salam died one year ago, on 21 November 1996, in Oxford, England. He had been unable to communicate for the previous three years as a result of a debilitating disease.

In the West, Salam was honoured as one of the foremost theoretical physicists of his generation. In the East, he was praised as the first Muslim to win a Nobel Prize in science.

Salam's reputation was also built on the success of the ICTP, which he often stated was his most prized accomplishment. The institution that he devoted 30 years of his life to-and which he loved dearly-will soon bear his name. After 21 November 1997, the ICTP will be called The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics.

To honour Salam's rich and complex legacy, News from ICTP asked two ICTP staff members, Seifallah Randjbar-Daemi and Faheem Hussain, to offer their views on the accomplishments of this charismatic man.

"As a scientist, Salam always had a wide range of interests," says Seifallah Randjbar-Daemi, an Iranian scientist who heads the ICTP's High Energy Physics Section. Randjbar-Daemi first met Salam in 1976 and worked closely with him from the early 1980s until Salam's death.

"His name, however, will forever be tied to the theory that has come to be known as the Standard Model, which is one of the greatest intellectual achievements of this century. The theory represents the cumulative effort of many imaginative thinkers who sought to discover what the physical world is made of and how it works."

"This endeavour," Randjbar-Daemi observes, "is very much in the European tradition. As a result, much of the work was carried out in the wealthy universities of Europe and North America."

"But among the creators of this intellectual system are representatives from other, less wealthy parts of the world."

Together with John Strathdee of the ICTP, Salam in the mid 1970s invented a mathematical framework of supersymmetry known as superspace.

And, in 1979, Salam shared the Nobel Prize with Sheldon Glashow and Stephen Weinberg for the mathematical and conceptual unification of the electromagnetic and the weak forces-concepts later proven to be correct by accelerator experiments in Europe and the United States. Then, during the 1980s and the early 1990s, Salam worked on various aspects of supersymmetry and superstrings.

As Randjbar notes, "Unification was the guiding principle of Salam's scientific thought. He was confident that the new theories of supersymmetry, developed during the 1970s, would permit the ultimate unification of all the forces of nature."

Randjbar still marvels at the speed at which Salam could join an entirely new field of research. He recalls, for example, that "In 1984, Michael Green of Queen Mary College in London and John Schwarz of Caltech in the United States circulated a preprint that launched the first superstring revolution." Their work made substantial use of the 10-dimensional supergravity theories.

"Salam asked us to examine the same quantum mechanical consistency problems in models of less than 10-dimensions. We soon constructed a 6-dimensional model and we sent our findings to the editors of Physics Letters B less than 10 weeks after they had received Green and Schwarz's breakthrough essay."

"This gives you some idea of the speed with which Salam-and the ICTP-would enter new fields," Randjbar observes. "He was always fired by an intense enthusiasm towards everything that was new and challenging."

Unification and speed characterised Salam's work as a promoter of science in the developing world as well.

Faheem Hussain, a Pakistani who is the coordinator of the ICTP Diploma Course in High Energy Physics, first met Salam at London's Imperial College, where he began his postgraduate studies in 1963.

"I don't know whether at the time of his formulation of the Standard Model, Salam felt he was close to the truth," Hussain recalls. "Salam was always enthusiastic and adventurous in his theories. Some of his ideas, of course, turned out to be great successes. But Salam also had somefailures, some of them quite big," Hussain notes. "This was the mark of the man: to speculate, to go to the edge."

"Salam was very enthusiastic about supersymmetry and especially about superstrings. When superstring theory really took off with the work of Green and Schwarz in the mid 1980s, he wanted everybody to work on it. I think he felt that superstring theory would lead towards further unification."

By then, Salam had certainly come a long way. After receiving his Ph.D. in Cambridge, in 1951, Salam had decided to return to Pakistan to work in his native country. But he was soon frustrated by the environment in which he found himself.

Within three years after his arrival, Salam realised that he faced an unwelcome choice between remaining in his native country and pursuing his professional career. He rationalised his decision to return to England by claiming he would be of no use to Pakistan if his work failed to progress because of the obstacles he faced.

"When Salam returned to Pakistan from Cambridge, he found that he simply could not do physics there," Hussain notes. "There was no structure, no tradition of research and no one to talk to."

As Hussain also observes, there's no doubt that Salam remained deeply troubled by his decision to turn his back on his home land. In fact, that very personal decision subsequently prompted Salam to propose the creation of the ICTP. In his mind, such a centre would help other young scientists avoid the difficult choice that he had to make.

Salam's journey, in fact, eased the way for others who followed in his path. "After I returned to Pakistan in 1968, upon receiving my Ph.D. from Imperial College in London and working as a postdoctoral student at the University of Chicago in the United States, I faced an entirely different situation," Hussain says.

"Thanks to his example, 10 particle theorists returned together to Pakistan to set up a group. We also received support from the ICTP through its Associateship Programme and Federation Scheme."

"We were not so isolated and could continue to do research in our home country, although with difficulty because we were not at one of the main centres of research. Periodic visits to the ICTP during my 20 years in Islamabad, before I left again, kept me alive as a physicist."

"Salam pursued realistic dreams," Hussain says. "He succeeded in implanting science in some developing countries, but not as much as he or others would have liked."

"Science, in fact, has flourished in countries like India, where the government has shown the political will to patronise science. There, the ICTP's help has been crucial. However, science is stagnating in countries like Pakistan, where successive governments have refused to support education and science."

"I think Salam's belief that there can be no economic and social development without scientific development remains as valid today as it was 20 years ago. Unless developing countries grasp this fact, they will remain impoverished."

As a religious man, Salam insisted that the Holy Koran encourages its followers to seek knowledge about nature. But he wrote many times that religious people in Islamic countries often boycott science, despite the magnificent accomplishments of Muslim scientists and philosophers in past centuries.

Hussain concurs that "Science is often ignored by many religious scholars and mullahs in some Islamic countries like Pakistan." However, he believes the Islamic world is not inherently opposed to science.

"Most people in the Islamic world," Hussain says, "adapt to modern science very well and are hungry for knowledge. Except for a misguided minority, who oppose modern science in the name of so-called indigenous non-Western knowledge, most people welcome scientific knowledge and the benefits it brings."

That, too, is one of the enduring legacies of Salam, another example of his relentless desire for unification.

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