Abdus Salam shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to unifying the weak and electromagnetic forces, but has been unusually overlooked by his homeland, as Matin Durrani explains

Read all about it Imperial College’s main library was renamed in honour of Abdus Salam in 2023, with visitors greeted by a large new tribute to him. (Courtesy: Imperial College London)"> Read all about it Imperial College’s main library was renamed in honour of Abdus Salam in 2023, with visitors greeted by a large new tribute to him. (Courtesy: Imperial College London)

The facts are simple enough.

Abdus Salam shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg 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”.

What Salam had done was to incorporate the Higgs mechanism – co-discovered by his colleague at Imperial College London Tom Kibble – into…