Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, has died - Livescience.com

Steven Weinberg, a Nobel-prize winning physicist whose work helped link two of the four fundamental forces, has died at the age of 88, the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) announced Saturday (July 24). .

His seminal work was a slim, three-page paper published in 1967 in the journal Physical Review Letters and entitled "A Model of Leptons." In it, he predicted how subatomic particles known as W, Z and the famous Higgs boson should behave — years before those particles were detected experimentally, according to a statement from UT Austin.

In 1979, Weinberg and physicists Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam earned the Nobel Prize in physics for this work.

"Professor Weinberg unlocked the mysteries of the universe for millions of people, enriching humanity's concept of nature and our relationship to the world," said Jay Hartzell, president of UT Austin, said in the statement.

By the time he was 16, he had decided to study theoretical physics, Weinberg wrote on the Nobel Prize website.

He married his wife Louise in 1954 and had a daughter, Elizabeth, in 1963, according to the Nobel Prize website.

In 1982, Weinberg moved to UT Austin, where he was a professor of physics and astronomy for decades.

She holds a master's in bioengineering from the University of Washington, a graduate certificate in science writing from UC Santa Cruz and a bachelor's in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.