Doctor Steven Weinberg was an American theoretical physicist who received numerous distinctions throughout his career, including the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979, and the National Medal for Science in 1991. Weinberg was born in New York city in 1933 and from an early age, he had an interest in theoretical physics and astrophysics. He earned his undergraduate degree from Cornell, went on to study at both the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen and Princeton, and later worked and lectured in many universities, including Columbia, Berkeley, Harvard, and MIT. 

In 1967, on a visit to MIT, he began to focus his studies on the unification of weak and electromagnetic interactions. He wrote a paper called “A Model of Leptons” that discussed the idea of spontaneous symmetry breaking and how that caused W and Z bosons to seem as if they were massive at low energy levels. The propositions in the paper were highly complicated, and for that reason, the paper received very few citations and praise until  Gerard t’Hooft, a Dutch physicist and professor, wrote a paper in 1970 that proved that Weinberg’s model was renormalizable; soon after, the paper became very popular in the physics community. Weinberg also contributed to the studies of cosmology and astrophysics, conducting research about matter-antimatter asymmetry and the cosmological constant.

After earning the Nobel Prize, Weinberg and his wife moved to Austin in the 1980s, where they both worked at UT Austin as professors. Unfortunately, Weinberg passed away on July 23rd, 2021 in Austin at the age of 88. His contributions to theoretical physics and his discoveries about the basic forces of life remain vital to the scientific community.

UC San Diego professor, Maria Geoppart Mayer, was a German-born American theoretical physicist who proposed the nuclear shell model for the atomic nucleus. For most of her career, Mayer worked in the field “just for the fun of doing physics” and did not get a job to be a full professor until she was 58. She played a crucial role in the Manhattan Project, and her efforts toward the project were not represented in the popular movie Oppenheimer which came out in 2023. She was the second woman (of five as of today) to win the Nobel Prize in physics. Mayer attended the University of Goettingen, with faculty members Enrico Fermi, Robert Oppenheimer, Werner Heisenberg, and Max Born, all of whom are now well-known figures in physics. She originally intended to study math, but could not resist her love of physics and was awarded her doctorate in 1930. 

Mayer worked with her husband, Joseph Mayer, a chemist at several well-renowned universities, and because of anti-nepotism rules, she never received a full-time job or salary. She was volunteering at the University of Columbia in the late 1930s when the university was conducting top-secret research to enrich uranium for an atomic bomb. After Pearl Harbor, Mayer took over Enrico Fermi’s classes, for which she was not paid. Shortly after, she began helping on research for the bomb and she worked briefly with Edward Teller on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, where they were developing the hydrogen bomb. She was torn on her work involving the bomb and later expressed her relief that her project failed. 

Inspired by a question proposed by Enrico Fermi, later in her career, Mayer proposed that inside the nucleus, protons and neutrons are arranged nucleon layers with neutrons and protons rotating around their axes and the center of the nucleus at different levels. She published her theory and was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1963 for her success. This discovery had major implications for atomic physics and later became crucial to our understanding of how atoms work. In 1960, Mayer became a full professor working at UC San Diego when the university opened, more than a decade after her discovery and 30 years after she had begun her career. Today, the Mayer Hall for physics students located in Revelle College at UCSD is named in honor of her contributions to the field of physics.