Naming Schools after Nobel Laureates

I had the pleasure of hearing Abdus Salam give a talk in Oxford, sometime around 1960. I naïvely asked why a neutron would decay into a proton and electron, rather than an antiproton and positron, and he gently explained to me the concept of baryon number, which I would have known about by that point if I had been paying proper attention to his talk. Both prose and neutron  have baryon (heavy particle) number +1, while their antiparticles have baryon number -1. They also have lepton (like particle) number 0, which is why the neutron decays into a proton, and electron, and an antineutrino.

The Mountain Mystery

Abdus Salam 1926-1996

The Washington Post recently ran a story about the late Abdus Salam, a physicist who won the Nobel Prize almost 40 years ago. The piece concerns the politics of naming a building at a Pakistani university in honour of a man from a religious minority background. Salam’s family belonged to the Ahmadiyya community – followers of a Muslim faith deemed heretical by Pakistan’s dominant Sunni Muslims. The religion was formally declared ‘non-Islamic’ by the Pakistani government in 1974. Before the new decree, extremists sometimes attacked and burned Ahmadi businesses, mosques and schools; after the decree, members could be imprisoned for their beliefs. In protest and for safety, Dr Salam moved to London.

Salam from Pakistan

Before leaving Pakistan, Salam had been the chief science advisor to Pakistan’s president, had contributed to theoretical and particle physics, was the founding director of the Space Research Commission (SUPARCO), and had…

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