Mohammad Abdus Salam (; 29 January 1926 – 21 November 1996) was a Pakistani theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate. He shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow "for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including, inter alia, the prediction of the weak neutral current". He was the first Pakistani, and second person from any Muslim country (after Anwar Sadat of Egypt) to win a Nobel Prize.
Salam was scientific advisor to the Ministry of Science and Technology in Pakistan from 1960 to 1974, a position from which he played a major and influential role in the development of the country's science infrastructure. Salam contributed to numerous developments in theoretical and particle physics in Pakistan. He was the founding director of the Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO). For this, he is viewed as the "scientific father" of this program. In 1974, Abdus Salam departed from his country in protest after the Parliament of Pakistan unanimously passed a parliamentary bill declaring members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, to which Salam belonged, non-Muslim.
Salam's notable achievements include the Pati–Salam model, a Grand Unified Theory he proposed along with Jogesh Pati in 1974, magnetic photon, vector meson, work on supersymmetry and most importantly, electroweak theory, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Salam made a major contribution at Imperial College London. Salam made important contributions to the modern theory on neutrinos, as well as the work on modernising quantum mechanics. As a teacher and science promoter, Salam is remembered as a founder and scientific father of theoretical physics in Pakistan during his term as the chief scientific advisor to the president. Salam heavily contributed to the rise of Pakistani physics within the global physics community.
Abdus Salam was born on 29 January 1926 in Jhang in the Punjab Province of British India (present day in Pakistan) into a Punjabi family professing Ahmadiyya. He belonged to the Muslim Rajput community, his son Ahmad Salam later recounted that he would tell him stories of Rajput cultural history "of which he was very proud". Jagjit Singh, in his biography of Salam, says that his family traditionally traced its genealogy back to a Rajput prince named Buddahn who converted to Islam at the hands of a Sufi preacher and later founded the city of Jhang around the year 1160. Salam was the son of Chaudhary Muhammad Hussain, a school teacher of Jhang and Hajirah who belonged to Faizullah Chak near Batala.
The name Choudhary Muhammad Hussain gave his son was Abd al-Salam which means "Servant of God". Abd means servant and Salam is one of the 99 names of God in the Qur'an. In English, his name is usually transliterated as Abdus Salam, which should be understood as a single given name. His father followed the custom of not giving a surname. Later in his life he added Mohammad to his name.
Salam established an early reputation in Punjab for outstanding academic performance. At age 14, he scored the highest marks ever recorded for the entrance examination of the Punjab University, earning a full scholarship to the Government College of Lahore. Instead of moving to Lahore immediately, he remained in Jhang and studied for two years at Government Intermediate College. In 1942, he passed his FA examinations with the highest scores in the province.
In 1942, Salam moved to Lahore to study at Government College. As a fourth-year student, he published an elegant solution for a mathematical problem originally studied by Srinivasa Ramanujan. In 1944, his mathematics exam results set a new Punjab record. Salam also excelled in Urdu and English literature, which could have led him to pursue further studies in English. However, on the recommendation of a mentor, he chose to continue with an M.A. in mathematics.
At his father's urging, Salam attempted to enter the Indian Civil Service (ICS), considered the most prestigious career path for young graduates. He applied to the Indian Railways but was rejected after failing the medical optical tests; examiners also ruled that he was too young to qualify. Salam remained in Lahore, completing his M.A. in mathematics at Government College in 1946 with record marks.
That same year, he was awarded a scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge, where he enrolled in the undergraduate Mathematical Tripos and graduated in 1949 with a Double First-Class Honours in Mathematics and Physics. Although his M.A. from Lahore would have qualified him to proceed directly to research, he still intended at that stage to pursue the ICS, and was advised to obtain a Cambridge mathematics degree first. In 1950, he received the Smith's Prize from Cambridge University for the most outstanding pre-doctoral contribution to Physics. After finishing his degrees, Fred Hoyle advised Salam to spend another year in the Cavendish Laboratory to do research in experimental physics, but Salam had no patience for carrying out experiments in the laboratory. Salam returned to Pakistan and renewed his scholarship before he returned to the United Kingdom to do his doctorate.
While at Cavendish, Salam entered a Ph.D program. His doctoral thesis titled "Developments in quantum theory of fields" contained comprehensive and fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics. By the time it was published in 1951, it had already gained him an international reputation and the Adams Prize.
During his doctoral studies, his mentors challenged him to solve within one year an intractable problem which had defied such great minds as Paul Dirac and Richard Feynman. Within six months, Salam had found a solution for the renormalization of meson theory. Salam had attracted the attention of Hans Bethe, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Dirac.
After receiving his doctorate in 1951, Salam returned to Lahore at the Government College University as a professor of mathematics, where he remained till 1954. In 1952, he was appointed professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics at the neighbouring University of the Punjab. In the latter capacity, Salam sought to update the university curriculum, introducing a course in quantum mechanics. He began to supervise the education of students who were particularly influenced by him. As a result, Riazuddin remained the only student of Salam who had the privilege to study under Salam at the undergraduate and post-graduate level in Lahore, and post-doctoral level in Cambridge University. In 1953, Salam was unable to establish a research institute in Lahore, as he faced strong opposition from his peers. Salam went back to Cambridge and joined St John's College. During 1957, his tenure at Imperial College, London started. As time passed, this department became one of the prestigious research departments that included well known physicists such as Steven Weinberg, Tom Kibble, Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, Riazuddin, and John Ward.
At Cambridge and Imperial College he formed a group of theoretical physicists, the majority of whom were his Pakistani students. At age 33, Salam became one of the youngest persons to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1959. Salam took a fellowship at Princeton University in 1959, where he met with J. Robert Oppenheimer and to whom he presented his research work on neutrinos. Oppenheimer and Salam discussed the foundation of electrodynamics, problems and their solution. His dedicated personal assistant was Jean Bouckley. In 1980, Salam became a foreign fellow of the Bangladesh Academy of Sciences.
Salam made an important and significant contribution in Particle physics. In his early career in Pakistan, Salam was greatly interested in mathematical series and their relation to physics. Salam had played an influential role in the advancement of nuclear physics, but he maintained and dedicated himself to mathematics and theoretical physics and focused Pakistan to do more research in theoretical physics. However, he regarded nuclear physics (nuclear fission and nuclear power) as a non-pioneering part of physics as it had already "happened". Even in Pakistan, Salam was the leading driving force in theoretical physics, with many scientists he continued to influence and encourage to keep their work on theoretical physics.