Visit Indian Travel Sites
Goa,
Kerala,
Tamil Nadu,
Andhra Pradesh,
Delhi,
Rajasthan,
Uttar Pradesh,
Himachal Pradesh,
Assam,
Sikkim,
Madhya Pradesh,
Jammu & Kashmir
Karnataka
|
'God-particle' Nobel Prize winning Pakistani physicist shunned in own country | Abdus Salam, the first Pakistani to win a Nobel Prize in physics after he predicted the
existence of the so-called 'God particle', has been shunned in his own country because of his
religious beliefs. Salam had predicted the existence of the Higgs-Boson particle in the 1970s
but despite being a leading figure in Pakistan's Space and Nuclear Program, he was shunned
by Muslim fundamentalists when they took control of the country during those years.
According to the Daily Mail, although Salam was a Muslim, the physicist, who died in 1996,
belonged to the Ahmadi sect, who believed Hadrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was their spiritual
leader as opposed to the Prophet Muhammad. As a result Salam, along with Pakistanis from
other religious minorities, such as Shiite Muslims, Christians and Hindus were attacked by
militants from the Sunni Muslim majority. The physicist's
life, along with the fate of the three million other Ahmadis in Pakistan, drastically
changed in 1974 when parliament amended the Constitution to declare that members
of the sect were not considered Muslims under Pakistani law. Salam resigned from
his government post in protest and eventually moved to Europe to pursue his work
and created a centre in Italy for theoretical physics to help physicists from
the developing world. He reportedly received a string of international prizes
and honours for his groundbreaking work in the world of subatomic physics, while
in 1979, he shared the Nobel Prize with Steven Weinberg for his research on the
Standard Model of particle physics, which theorized that fundamental forces govern
the overall dynamics of the universe. Salam died on 21 November 1996 at the age
of 70 in Oxford, England, after a long illness.
|
|
|
|
|
|