Steven Weinberg is a distinguished theorist whose research has covered a broad range of topics in quantum field theory, elementary particle physics, and cosmology. Along with Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam, he was awarded the 1979 Physics Nobel Prize for his contributions to the standard model of elementary particles. He is currently a physics and astronomy professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Weinberg was educated at Cornell University, the Niels Bohr Institute, and Princeton University and has taught and conducted research at Columbia University; the University of California, Berkeley; MIT; and Harvard University. He is also known as a skilled writer. For the general audience, he has written, among others, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (updated edition, Basic Books, 1993) and Lake Views: This World and the Universe (Harvard University Press, 2010). For the physics student and practitioner, he has written the classic Gravitation and Cosmology: Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity (Wiley, 1972), the more recent Cosmology (Oxford University Press, 2008), and the three-volume Quantum Theory of Fields (Cambridge University Press, 1995, 1996, 2000).
His latest textbook is Lectures on Quantum Mechanics (Cambridge University Press, 2013), which sprang from a UT Austin course he has taught to first-year graduate students. Mark Srednicki's Physics Today review, appearing this month, describes it as presenting the standard graduate-level material "with a high level of rigor and clarity and with numerous discussions of related physics not always found in other textbooks," but also lacking in figures, which may "temper its appeal as a primary textbook, especially for students with limited preparation." Weinberg responded to the latter issue and more when Physics Today approached him recently to discuss the book.
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