IDEALS AND REALITIES:
Selected Essays of Abdus Salam
Abdus Salam; C.H. Lai, editor
World Scientific, Singapore; 379 pages; $44 (hardback), $28 (paperback)
In this wide-ranging and delightful collection of essays, Nobel laureate Abdus Salam reflects on three of his major preoccupations: the Third World, Islam, and physics.
Salam draws on his own experiences to present the plight of scientists in developing countries “When I returned to Pakistan in 1951 after working at Cambridge. and Princeton in particle physics, I could, in a country of 90 million, call on just one physicist who had ever worked with Dirac’s equations. The most recent issues of the Physical Review available were dated just before the Second World War of 1939. There were no grants whatsoever for attending symposia or conferences; the only time I did attend a conference in the United Kingdom I paid a year’s savings.”
Since then, Salam has endeavored to ...
