مسلمانوں کا نیوٹن ۔ ڈاکٹر عبدالسلام — Page 400
390 Nature, December 27, 1996 Physics With A Purpose Ehasn Masood Muhammad Abdus Salam, the Nobel-prize winning scientist, who died last week age 70, was in London when the phone rang at noon on an autumn day in 1979۔The call was long-distance from Stockholm, headquarters of the Alfred Nobel Foundation۔Salam, the devoutly religions son of a schoolteacher from a village in Punjab had won the Nobel Prize for physics۔He remains the first and only Pakistani to have been given science's highest order۔Salam's instinctive reaction, according to his biographer, the Indian science writer Jagjit Singh, was to jump into his car and drive to his local mosque where he took off his shoes and knelt in prayer۔Salam's joy turned to near ecstasy when he learnt that he had been nominated by Paul Dirac, of the leading physicists of this century, who was also an atheist۔"What impressed Salam most was that the atheist Dirac had become an instrument in executing Allah's will۔" Salam's next action was to use his new-found recognition to secure a four- fold increase in funding for the ICTP, a center providing modern research facilities for Third World scientists۔The facility was founded by Salam in 1964 and is based on the shores of the Adriatic in Italy, near the border with what was then Yugoslavia۔Salam was later given a presidential reception in his native Pakistan, before embarking on a tour of the Third World countries giving lectures on science, education, and the eradication of poverty, the three subjects۔(apart from physics) for which Salam's passion ran very deep۔Salam's major scientific achievement was to take the first step towards an idea that his scientific peers still dream about the unification of the four fundamental forces of nature: gravity, the strong force between particles in the atom, the weak force that causes radioactive decay and electromagnetism۔Salam shared the Nobel prize with Stephen Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow for unifying the weak force with electromagnetism۔John Hassard, a colleague at Imperial College in London, where Salam was a professor- of theoretical physics since 1957, ranks him in the "top ten if not top five, physicists of this century۔” But just as the organizers of the Miss World annual pageant feel obliged to delve into social causes under the banner 'beauty with a purpose', Salam felt he could not restrict his time and energy to just theoretical physics۔He felt compelled to use his fame to champion a plethora of Third World causes۔This was 'physics with a purpose۔” " Like his Nobel-winning colleague Stephen Weinberg, Salam, too dreamed of a final theory unifying the forces of nature, but he had an additional wish: that the developing world would one- day catch up with the West۔A part of him wished that no one should have to experience life without electricity, running water, medical care, proper roads and decent transport, as he had to while growing up In Punjab during the inter-war years۔Another part of him pined for a return to the 'glorious years' of Islamic civilization when sciences flourished in the Muslim world۔Salam's mission