Dr. Abdus Salam
Source: www.dawn.com
On the Jan 29, 1926, Chaudhry Muhammad Hussein and Bibi Hajira Hussien had a baby boy at their two-bedroom abode in Jhang. They named him Abdus Salam — ‘servant of peace’.
Right from the start, Salam was deeply invested in his academic growth. At 14, he scored record breaking marks in Punjab University’s matriculation entrance exams. In 1942, Salam joined the Government College University at Lahore. He enrolled to study Mathematics A and B, and English. Apart from being somewhat of a prodigy at mathematics, Salam was also seen as a highly able student of the English language by his mentors. It is recorded that some of his tutors thought he would make a great English teacher.
In Mathematics, Salam published his first paper in 1943. It was titled, “A problem of Ramanujan”. He graduated next year with jaw-dropping scores: 300 out of 300 marks in Mathematics, 121 out of 150 in English Honours. He stood first at his university, breaking all records in the B.A examinations. As a result of Salam’s high scores, he secured a scholarship for further studying mathematics at Cambridge University’s prestigious St John’s College.
His time at Cambridge ended, for the time being, with a PhD at the Cavendish Laboratory at St John’s. By the end of his tenure, he had made a mark in the scientific fraternity as a promising young scientist.
In 1951, after having won a number of awards and accolades, Salam was ready to move back to Pakistan. He dismissed an opportunity to spend a year at Princeton University (where Professor Albert Einstein was too!) and took up the offer to head the mathematics department at the Government College Lahore (GC).
In February 1953, anti-Ahmadiyya riots set the city of Lahore ablaze. Incidents of looting, arson attacks spread across not just Lahore but to other parts of Punjab as well. Hundreds of Ahmadis were feared to be murdered.
When the dust settled, Abdus Salam had returned to St John’s College as a mathematics lecturer.
A fresh start
I returned to Cambridge in 1954 as a lecturer and Fellow of St. John’s College. Three years later, I accepted a professorship at Imperial College, London, where I succeeded in establishing one of the best theoretical physics groups in the world.
Despite his move from Pakistan, sections of the Pakistani academia and intelligentsia had begun to value Salam as an asset. He was inducted in 1954, as a fellow at the Pakistan Academy of Sciences.
In 1955, Salam had his first brush with the UN as scientific secretary at the first ‘Atoms for Peace’ conference. He also helped set up the United Nations Advisory Committee for Science and Technology. The experience was memorable, as he narrated in an interview, years later.
Heading the Theoretical Physics department at Imperial College
In 1957, Salam joined Imperial College London, initially, as a lecturer of applied mathematics. By next 1960, he was bestowed with the responsibility of chairing the Theoretical Physics department, along with Paul Matthews.
In both Cambridge and London, he had formulated a team of scientists to work with, a majority of whom were Pakistanis. One such scientist was Munir Rashid.
In an interview with Dawn.com, Rashid spoke about the kind of work ethic that characterised Salam.
Scientific secretary for the Government of Pakistan
President Field Marshal Ayub Khan appointed Abdus Salam as his Chief Scientific Officer. With this appointment, Salam endeavoured to improve the standard of scientific progress in Pakistan, using his newly legitimised influence as a leading scientist. During the 60s Abdus Salam gained influence in Pakistan’s domestic scientific policy and established a number of scientific institutions in Pakistan.
By now, Professor Salam was juggling a hectic schedule. A lot of his time was spent travelling, mentoring PhD students around the world. Central to his professional ambitions was the idea of developing science in the third world. Despite the obstacles in his path, Salam devoted his energies towards establishing scientific institutions in Pakistan. Together, with I H Usmani, another Pakistani scientist, Salam set out to do this. He became a member of Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Commission and under the ‘nuclear’ umbrella, did much more than just enhance Pakistan’s nuclear energy capabilities.
The International Centre for Theoretical Physics was another brainchild of Professor Abdus Salam. Professor Salam believed in the potential that scientists from the third-world could offer to the global scientific community. ICTP was set up in Italy’s Trieste after attempts to establish such an institution in Pakistan failed. His colleague Munir Rashid narrates:
The notion of a Centre that should cater particularly to the needs of physicists from developing countries had lived with me from 1954, when I was forced to leave my own country because I realised that if I stayed there much longer, I would have to leave physics, through sheer intellectual isolation.
In 1968, Salam received the Atoms for Peace award for his efforts in “making the world aware of the benefits to be gained from using nuclear knowledge for peace, health and prosperity.”
In 1970, Salam helped set up Pakistan’s first nuclear power plant in Karachi with the help of Canadian and Pakistani engineers.
In 1974 under Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s regime, the Constitution (second amendment) Act was passed in Parliament, declaring Ahmedis as non-muslims.
The pinnacle of my physics career came in 1979 when I shared the Nobel Physics Prize with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg for our unification of electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force in the ‘electroweak’ (a word which I invented in 1978) theory, one of the major achievements of twentieth century physics. This theory had made predictions that could be verified by experiment. The most revealing of these was that a new particle exists at extreme energies. To test this theory we had to convince the experimental physicists working on the great particle accelerators to build new equipment: To create, in principle, conditions that would be similar to those first few moments in the birth of the universe.
Abdus Salam died at the age of 70. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and had become frail and weak towards the end of his life. Salam’s journey from Jhang to the peripheries of scientific knowledge is a wonder in itself. He is remembered fondly by the global scientific community at large.
Regretfully his epitaph continues to provide a ground for ideological warfare between conflicting schools of religious political thought; the word ‘Muslim’ is often erased from his tombstone.