Steven Weinberg was born in New York City, a son of Jewish immigrants. He was educated at Cornell, Copenhagen, and Princeton, where he earned his Ph.D. He taught at Columbia, Berkeley, M.I.T., and at Harvard where, from 1973 to 1982, he was Higgins Professor of Physics.
He became interested in SPME when in May, 2006, he learned that NATFHE (National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education), a union of UK college and university lecturers, was promoting a motion to boycott of Israeli academics. He joined with a group of Nobel Laureates in opposing NATFHE’s motion, announcing his opposition. The Times Higher Education Supplement of London invited him to share his views, and he later published his statement to the Times in his latest book, LakeViews (Ch. 20). He argues that boycotts are antithetical to the basic purpose of the university as an institution, and the selection of Israel as a target of boycotts reflects either “spectacular moral blindness or a hatred of Jews or both;” or, as he later added, an immoral pandering to the voting population of Muslims in the UK.
When the NATFHE boycott motion passed, he withdrew his acceptance of an invitation to speak at a conference on Cosmology at the University of Durham (UK). Later he received an invitation to speak at Imperial College, London, in July 2007, and he accepted since the NATFHE boycott had been lifted. But in May of 2007 the National Union of Journalists of Great Britain voted at its national conference to boycott Israeli products. So, as a gesture of moral protest, he cancelled his acceptance and wrote a letter of explanation to the colleagues who had invited him. His letter was later published in the UK Guardian and the Times Higher Education Supplement.
Prof. Weinberg holds SPME and Ed Beck in the highest regard, especially because SPME is a very helpful source of unbiased information about the Arab-Israel conflict. He suggests that SPME continue to oppose boycotts and other anti-Israel manifestations.
During his tenure at Berkeley, he developed the approach to quantum field theory that is described in the first chapters of his book The Quantum Theory of Fields, and he started to write his textbook Gravitation and Cosmology. Both continue to be among the most influential texts in the scientific community in their subjects.
In 1966, Weinberg accepted a lecturer position at Harvard. In 1967 he was a visiting professor at MIT where he proposed his model of unification of electromagnetism and of nuclear weak forces. His paper presenting this theory is one of the most often cited theoretical works in high energy physics as of 2009.
In 1982 he moved to The University of Texas at Austin and founded its Theory Group in the Physics Department, where he holds the Jack S. Josey-Welch Foundation Regents Chair in Science and is a member of the Physics and Astronomy Departments.
He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 and the National Medal of Science in 1991.
He is the recipient of many other honors and awards, including the Heinemann Prize in Mathematical Physics, the Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute, the Madison Medal of Princeton University, and the Oppenheimer Prize. He also holds honorary doctoral degrees from a dozen universities.
He is married, and his wife is a professor of law at University of Texas, Austin.
Besides his scientific research, Steven Weinberg has been a prominent public spokesman for science, testifying before Congress in support of the Superconducting Super Collider, writing articles for the New York Review of Books, and giving various lectures on the larger meaning of science.
Weinberg is also known for his support of Israel. In his 2001 book “Facing up: Science and its cultural adversaries,” his chapter 17, “Zionism and Its Cultural Adversaries,” explains his views on the issue of Israel and the biased treatment it receives in the media and among academics.
(Parts of this biography were taken from: http://www.physlink.com/Education/essay_weinberg.cfm )
