Gordon Fraser

Abdus Salem was born in British India. He went to college in England and while there partition occurred turning his homeland into Pakistan. He and his family belonged to the Ahmadi sect of Islam. Pakistan eventually cracked down on the Ahmadis and the sect was declared heretical by the government. Passports of the Ahmadis reflected this heretical status and Salam and others of the Ahmadis were forbidden to enter Saudi Arabia for religious reasons. Abdus Salam maintained ties with Pakistan but ended up in the end being a person without a homeland.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1979 for his work on the electroweak force. Many Muslims still do not acknowledge his win as going to a Muslim because of the heretic status. Salam never stopped trying to bridge differences between intractable groups. He founded the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy as a place for students and researchers to come together from places that did not usually interact. He was a tireless diplomat and an advocate for giving science a place in modern Islam.

The cosmic anger comes from his sense of the inequalities of the world. There are talented people born into third world countries that have no outlets or resources to contribute to the scientific or academic world. He spent a lot of his life trying to give some of these people an opportunity.

The biography mainly covers his academic and professional life. There is very little of his personal life. He did marry a woman from his traditional tribal area and also married a molecular biophysics researcher from England. This is mentioned in passing but no details emerge. Abdus Salam spent his career in particle physics but remained religiously devout. That is not the usual in physics.

Fraser's book has a little subcontinent history, some history of science, the surface layer of Salam's life, and a bit of religion history. It is not a definitive biography but rather a quick look at a part of the second half of the twentieth century and one man's place in it.… (more)