Peter Woit has blogged about an oral history interview with theoretical physicist Sheldon Glashow published in 2020 by the American Institute of Physics. (They have a great oral history of physics series you should check out if you’re interested.) Woit zeroed in on a portion in which Glashow talks about his faltering friendship with Steven Weinberg and his issues with Abdus Salam’s nomination for the physics Nobel Prize.

Glashow, Weinberg and Salam together won this prize in 1979, for their work on the work on electroweak theory, which describes the behaviour of two fundamental forces, the electromagnetic force and the weak force. Glashow recalls that his and Weinberg’s friendship – having studied and worked together for many years – deteriorated in the 1970s, a time in which both scientists were aware that they were due a Nobel Prize. According to Glashow, however, Weinberg wanted the prize to be awarded only to himself and Salam.

This is presumably because of how the prize-winning work came to be: with Glashow’s mathematical-physical model published in 1960, Weinberg building on it seven years later, with Salam’s two relevant papers appeared a couple years after Glashow’s paper and a year after Weinberg’s. Glashow recalls that Salam’s work was not original, that each of his two papers respectively echoed findings already published in Glashow’s and Weinberg’s papers. Instead, Glashow continues, Salam received the Nobel Prize probably because he had encouraged his peers and his colleagues to nominate him a very large number of times and because he set up the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste.

This impression, of Salam being undeserving from a contribution-to-physics point of view in Glashow’s telling, is very at odds with the impression of Salam based on reading letters and comments by Weinberg and Pervez Hoodbhoy and by watching the documentary Salam – The First ****** Nobel Laureate.

The topic of Salam being a Nobel laureate was never uncomplicated, to begin with: he was an Ahmadi who enjoyed the Pakistan government’s support until he didn’t, when he was forced to flee the country; his intentions with the ICTP – to give scholars from developing countries a way to study physics without having to contend with often-crippling resource constrains – were also noble. Hoodbhoy has also written about the significance of Salam’s work as a physicist and the tragedy of his name and the memories of his contributions having been erased from all the prominent research centres in Pakistan.

Finally, one of Salam’s nominees for a Nobel Prize was the notable British physicist and Nobel laureate Paul A.M. Dirac, and it seems strange that Dirac would endorse Salam if he didn’t believe Salam’s work deserved it.

Bearing these facts in mind, Glashow’s contention appears to be limited to the originality of Salam’s work. But to my mind, even if Salam’s work was really derivative, it was at par with that of Glashow and Weinberg. More importantly, while I believe the Nobel Prizes deserve to be abrogated, the prize-giving committee did more good than it might have realised by including Salam among its winners: in the words of Weinberg, “Salam sacrificed a lot of possible scientific productivity by taking on that responsibility [to set up ICTP]. It’s a sacrifice I would not make.”

Glashow may not feel very well about Salam’s inclusion for the 1979 prize and the Nobel Prizes as we know are only happy to overlook anything other than the scientific work itself, but if the committee really screwed up, then they screwed up to do a good thing.

Then again, even though Glashow wasn’t alone (he was joined by Martinus J.G. Veltman on his opinions against Salam), the physicists’ community at large doesn’t share his views. Glashow also cites an infamous 2014 paper by Norman Dombey, in which Dombey concluded that Salam didn’t deserve his share of the prize, but the paper’s reputation itself is iffy at best.

In fact, this is all ultimately a pointless debate: there are just too many people who deserve a Nobel Prize but don’t win it while a deeper dive into the modern history of physics should reveal a near-constant stream of complaints against Nobel laureates and their work by their peers. It should be clear today that both winning a prize and not winning a prize ought to mean nothing to the practice of science.

The other remarkable thing about Glashow’s comments in the interview (as cited by Woit) is what I like to think of as the seemingly eternal relevance of Brian Keating’s change of mind. Brian Keating is an astrophysicist who was at the forefront of the infamous announcement that his team had discovered evidence of cosmic inflation, an epoch of the early universe in which it is believed to have expanded suddenly and greatly, in March 2014. There were many problems leading up to the announcement but there was little doubt at the time, and Keating also admitted later, that its rapidity was motivated by the temptation to secure a Nobel Prize.

Many journalists, scientists and others observers of the practice of science routinely and significantly underestimate the effect the Nobel Prizes exert on scientific research. The prospect of winning the prize for supposedly discovering evidence of cosmic inflation caused Keating et al. to not wait for additional, confirmatory data before making their announcement. When such data did arrive, from the Planck telescope collaboration, Keating et al. suffered for it with their reputation and prospects.

Similarly, Weinberg and Glashow fell out because, according to Glashow, Weinberg didn’t wish Glashow to give a talk in 1979 discussing possible alternatives to the work of Weinberg and Salam because Weinberg thought doing such a thing would undermine his and Salam’s chances of being awarded a Nobel Prize. Eventually it didn’t, but that’s beside the point: this little episode in history is as good an illustration as any of how the Nobel Prizes and their implied promises of laurels and prestige render otherwise smart scientists insecure, petty and elbows-out competitive – in exchange for sustaining an absurd and unjust picture of the scientific enterprise.

All of this goes obviously against the spirit of science.
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The Disingenuous Mr. Qaiser Ahmed Raja | Epimetheus (wordpress.com)

The Disingenuous Mr. Qaiser Ahmed Raja

On May 28th 1998, Pakistan conducted its nuclear tests in the mountains of Chagi, Balochistan. The whole nation celebrated, dubbed it ‘youm-e-Takbeer’ and Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan was given all the credit. Fast forward to 2003, Mr. Khan is caught selling parts to the centrifuges (which was supposed to be secret) to other nations and the then president Gen. Musharraf made him apologize publicly (and he was placed under house arrest).

Pakistan has been working on its nuclear capabilities for a while; the program was sanctioned back in the early 70’s after the fall of Dhaka. The prime minister at the time, Mr. Bhutto, asked Dr. Abd-us-Salam to advise on this. While it was public knowledge that Dr. Salam was responsible for the development of the nuclear program in Pakistan, he was resented by the right-wing elements due to his faith.

Fast forward to 2024, it was highlighted on social media that Dr. Khan was just a ‘metallurgist’ who gave no input to the actual bomb’s mathematics (which Mr. Dombey agrees with). Coincidentally, the Quaid-e-Azam University planned to conduct its science fair naming it “Dr. Abd-us-Salam Science Fair”. The right-wingers were enraged, and they began a slander campaign against Pakistan’s only Nobel Laureate. At the behest of this campaign, a social media influencer and (not) a motivational speaker, Mr. Qaiser Ahmed Raja.

Mr. Raja is a self-proclaimed journalist, lawyer, biologist, a coach, and many more things. He began with a video highlighting the fact that Dr. Salam’s paper of 1964 (which Dr. Salam wrote with John Clive Ward) was plagiarized work of Dr. Sheldon Glashow’s 1961 paper. We have to keep in mind that this is not a new claim as Dr. Glashow has actually ‘claimed’, citing a paper of Norman Dombey who posted this in 2011. Norman Dombey’s paper is divided into two parts, in which he discusses, at length, the life of Dr. Abd-us-Salam. You may read about the whole controversy here. Just for the knowledge of the reader, the author (Norman Dombey) in the same series of papers credits Dr. Salam with Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities (including the bomb) and in his letter (in review of the book Pakistan’s Bomb by Owen Bennett-Jones) suggests that Dr. Khan was a thief and claims he (Dr. Khan) was not even a scientist.

Since Mr. Raja started posting his ‘lectures’ on YouTube, many scientists naturally came forward to defend the work of Dr. Salam (naturally) as it was not just a matter of Dr. Salam’s own reputation but the reputation of the State of Pakistan and its science community was on the line. One brave effort was made by Dr. Rehman, who made his YouTube channel and started off by refuting Mr. Raja on his claims.

Dr. Rehman (in his first attempt) tried to ‘dumb’ it down for the layman to understand the contributions of Dr. Salam, but Mr. Raja came up with a series of new questions in his response. To which, Dr. Rehman had to make another video, this time responding to the queries put forth by Mr. Raja and concluding that while the Nobel prize was shared between three scientists. It was well deserved.

This wasn’t enough for Mr. Raja, and he has now come out with another video, in which he not only challenges Dr. Rehman’s observations but sinks to the level of personal attacks on the young scientist. Let’s briefly review his claims in his latest video.

The beginning is just the intro about how someone else was claiming to read Mr. Salam’s (one page) paper, but Mr. Raja points out it is not the case and the paper is not contained to just one page. Just a disclaimer here: Mr. Raja himself doesn’t seem to have read Dr. Salam’s 1964 paper (if he would have he would know about it). In his previous videos, he already admitted that he isn’t a physicist and that he is only researching in a ‘journalistic’ capacity. His entire research is based on two books and a paper by Dr. Norman Dombey.

At 02:49 of the video, Mr. Raja plays the first clip of Dr. Rehman’s video. Here, Dr. Rehman is suggesting that the first (valid) paper to talk about Electro-weak interaction was written by Dr. Salam (in 1958) and that both works (Dr. Glashow’s 1961 paper and Dr. Salam’s 1964 paper) were incomplete as they were mere theories at the time. To this, Mr. Raja seems to be confused as to why Dr. Rehman has eluded to the ‘Standard Model’ while their topic is ‘Electro-weak interaction’. Mr. Raja ‘claims’ that by definition the Standard Model contains ‘Strong nuclear force’ as well, while the topic at hand is only ‘Electro-weak’.

Mr. Raja seems to not fully grasp Dr. Rehman’s response. Dr. Rehman clearly suggests that ‘work was underway towards the Standard Model’, to which Electro-weak did contribute. And the paper discussing the Electro-weak interaction was first credited to Dr. Salam in 1958 (which was published in 1959 [“Weak and Electromagnetic Interactions” (Il Nuovo Cimento, Vol. XI, No. 4, 16 February 1959, pp. 568-577)].

In order to run away from this fact, Mr. Raja further claims that the Standard Model wasn’t conceptualized until 1970. Which is true, but Mr. Raja fails to understand that the underlying work ‘towards’ the Standard Model began in the late 1950s. At the end, he simply puts it like this, the Standard Model is Standard Model and Electro-weak model is Electro-weak model, while the fact of the matter is that Electro-weak theory (a term coined by Dr. Salam) is a unification of the electromagnetic ‘interaction’ and the weak ‘interaction’ of what we now know as THE STANDARD MODEL.

Moving forward at 06:21, he plays the second clip of Dr. Rehman’s video where Dr. Rehman has proven that Dr. Salam was the first to write about Electro-weak interactions (thus implying he was already working on it). Mr. Raja, now seemingly crossed (as he sees his house of cards falling down), states that maybe Dr. Rehman’s knowledge about the ‘history of science’ is somehow compromised (and that his ‘research’ is infallible). Mr. Raja then claims that Schwinger presented the idea of the three vector bosons and not Salam. Interestingly, Schwinger is cited by Salam in his 1958 paper (and so is Glashow), but Mr. Raja completely overlooks the fact that Schwinger, while ‘suggested’ electroweak interactions, never worked towards unifying the interactions. Glashow, being Schwinger’s student extended his work and tried to do the same (which Salam was already doing independently with Prentki).

Therefore, once again, misleading the ‘dumb’ masses. Mr. Raja should go ahead and read the paper before resorting to personal attacks on Dr. Rehman. Mr. Raja goes on to further vilify the young scientist, claiming that Dr. Rehman was ‘lying’ and ‘was not aware of the facts’. (Because Mr. Raja is a self-proclaimed scientist as well.) One should also take into account Dr. Gerard ‘t Hooft’s view on this, which is completely in sync with what Dr. Rehman has concluded.

Now in the third part, Dr. Rehman tries to piece together the series of events that lead to the Electro-weak theory (or the theory of Electro-weak interactions), to which Mr. Raja is now trying to mislead his viewers by claiming that Dr. Rehman stated that Dr. Salam’s Nobel was based on his efforts in 1964. Well, Mr. Raja, it wasn’t Dr. Rehman, it was YOU, in fact, who started with this claim that Dr. Salam was given the Nobel prize for his 1964 work (and that his 1968 work is non-existent according to you), he further goes on to ‘claim’ that since 1964’s paper wasn’t cited in Weinberg’s 1967 work, therefore it’s not worth anything. He concludes by stating that since Dr. Rehman in his first video (totally debunked the plagiarism claim, which by the way was Mr. Raja’s original case), said that Dr. Salam’s 1964 paper is noteworthy because it changed the structure of the Electro-weak interaction (something that Glashow never did) therefore he doesn’t understand how to proceed with this ‘saga’ as Salam’s work wasn’t cited by Weinberg.

In the end, he again falsely claims that Dr. Rehman somehow stated that the Nobel effort of Dr. Salam was only his 1964 paper, while all Dr. Rehman did was successfully prove that it wasn’t plagiarized. Which in turn REFUTES Mr. Qaiser Ahmed Raja’s original claim. Since Mr. Raja has been refuted, he is now skillfully backtracking away from his original claim and attributing statements to Dr. Rehman which he never put forward. (Admitting defeat).

It’s amazing how Mr. Raja who started from the plagiarism claim, now not only seems to be backtracking from it, but has completely put it behind and is now beating around the bush, twisting the facts, and trying to lead the viewers to believe that the young scientist, who put forth authentic research with evidence, is somehow misleading. This is now turning into a slander campaign against Dr. Rehman, to whom I will humbly suggest not to engage Mr. Raja as he is now losing his mind because all of his ‘research’ (consisting of one paper and a book) is being scrutinized. I would like to commend your effort in putting such ‘influencers’ who seem to know it all in their place.

Attention-hungry people like Mr. Raja will stop at nothing to malign the good name of hard-working scientists who will disagree with him; he will use all his resources in this slander campaign (spreading so many lies that people start believing in them) to ‘refute’ any academic. Mr. Raja manipulates and threads carefully around the hard known facts, completely avoiding the true picture, and presents ‘his’ version of facts as the ‘ultimate’ truth.

Mr. Qaiser Ahmed Raja, this ‘saga’ has only exposed your prejudice and bigotry towards an esteemed and a celebrated scientist. Just because of his faith, you went on an outrageous defamation campaign against him that you lost track of your own truths. God knows why Glashow came forward with these claims after Salam’s death. If he was honest (to his work and profession), he should have had said something or wrote to the scientific community or the Nobel committee in particular. In his Nobel speech, he is showering Dr. Salam with praises and accolades. Was he lying then? Is he lying now?

What’ s happening is that your videos are now acting as a hate-mongering tool towards Pakistan’s only Nobel Laureate (in physics) and making life hard for those who are of the same beliefs as Dr. Salam. A sincere effort would be to put your findings in front of the Nobel committee and ask them to revoke Dr. Salam’s status as a Nobel Laureate (if you can).