Larry D. Moore · CC BY 4.0

Shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow for unifying two of the universe's fundamental forces, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, into a single theory that correctly predicted weak neutral currents before they were observed. His three-volume textbook The Quantum Theory of Fields became a standard reference for a generation of physicists. Weinberg spent much of his career at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote frequently for a general audience in The New York Review of Books, and worked as a Cold War arms-control consultant.