In the spring of 1957, the Weinbergs moved to New York for his job at Columbia University, where important experimental work had taken place throught the 1950s. He writes some (largely unimportant) papers on symmetry principles and weak interactions. His first encounter with Murray Gell-Mann gets off to a rocky start. Weinberg starts building a network of colleagues and friends. He misses the chance of tenure at Columbia, so rather than stay for another year as a postdoc, he decides to take up a research position at Berkeley. Before he leaves, he submits his paper on renormalization and infinities.

The trip first takes in Japan, then Hong Kong, and Singapore. In Singapore, he loses a case containing all of his notes, and learns to lecture without them. He visits some Indian institutes and then flies to Israel. After tourist stopovers in Istanbul and Athens, they arrive finally in London as guests of Abdus Salam. He begins work on a research project on bound states in strong forces, which leads nowhere. He gives invited talks throughout the UK. They spend some time in Italy before attending the Rochester Conference of 1962, in Geneva. Weinberg receives news that he has been promoted to associate professor. They return to New York via Lisbon, after 280 days away.

The author describes his parents’ upbringing and move to New York around the time of the Great Depression. The young Weinberg is encouraged to read widely and later takes inspiration from Norse myths from the Poetic Edda.

Weinberg takes the standard first-year courses for physics students, studying mechanics, heat, light, and electromagnetism. While these are not the fancy modern topics, they are the essential foundations for everything else he would learn in physics. He joins Telluride House, a fraternity. In his sophomore year, he lets his studies slide (except for physics and math). He pulls out of this slump with the determination not to waste any more time and forms the habit of being a compulsive worker. He lands a summer job at Bell Telephone Laboratories. In his senior year, he learns quantum mechanics. He decides to apply to graduate school to study for a PhD in physics, and to marry Louise Goldwasser.

Having finished her law degree, Louise takes up work at a Boston law firm; they are not returning to Berkeley after all, so Weinberg resigns his professorship there. At MIT, he continues teaching graduate courses on general relativity, with an emphasis on cosmology. He spends the spring of 1971 in Paris, making comparisons between the academic characters of Paris and Boston. Gerard ’t Hooft and Martinus Veltman renormalize Weinberg’s theory of leptons, showing an experimental route to proving the theory. Weinberg starts to consider the extension of the electroweak theory to strongly interacting theories. Electroweak theory starts to receive a lot more attention from theorists. His first book, Gravitation and Cosmology, is published in 1972. Weinberg is offered the Higgins Professorship at Harvard, and accepts.

Familiarity with chemistry from children’s toy kits leads Weinberg to investigate physics, the subject that underlies all of chemistry. He reads George Gamow’s Mr. Tompkins books, among others. He is admitted to the famous Bronx High School of Science, where he becomes friends with Shelly Glashow and Gary Feinberg, who would also become well-known physicists. He wins a New York state scholarship to Cornell.

Now in Boston, Weinberg describes how his earlier work on current algebra led to effective field theory. With the Vietnam War going on, JASON work focuses on the war effort. In 1967, Weinberg takes up a lectureship at MIT and published his most-cited paper, “A Model of Leptons,” which heralded electroweak theory. He attends the Solvay conference in Brussels in 1967, but misses being in the group photo. Back in Boston, Weinberg discusses making friends through his election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He becomes involved in an independent study of the US’ anti-ballistic missile program, concluding that this would hasten the arms race between the US and the Soviet Union.

Back in Berkeley, Weinberg reconsiders how we understand some of the theories of physics, that is, why they actually are true. He begins teaching a general relativity course starting from physical principles, rather than the usual geometric approach. These course notes later became the basis for his book Gravitation and Cosmology. Around this time, Louise was pregnant, so Weinberg avoided opportunities to travel to spend more time at home. He begins working on functional analysis, but discovers the Russian Faddeev has already done foundational work in this area. Weinberg then reexamines what he knows about quantum field theory, and jettisons the Heisenberg–Pauli canonical formalism, taking particles as his starting point. This led him to a clearer understaning of antimatter. He embarks on a series of papers about massless particles. in 1964, he is promoted to full professor. Louise applied to Harvard Law School, prompting a move to Cambridge, Mass.

In the 1980s, two groups of physicists in Europe and America began to lay plans for a high energy proton accelerator that could settle the question of electroweak symmetry breaking. In 1984, Weinberg is appointed to the SSC Board of Overseers, and this work would occupy his time for much of the next decade. Weinberg testifies before Congress in favor of the SSC project and starts to appreciate the role of pork-barrel politics in the siting decisions. The Texas site of Waxahachie, near Dallas, is approved in 1988. The project’s construction funding is approved but faces ongoing challenges from other competing areas of science. Changes in the specifications, required by the science goals, lead to increases in the costs, resulting in bad press. In 1993, the funding was cut, and the SSC was killed off. Weinberg writes a successful trade book, Dreams of a Final Theory.

Shortly after moving to Berkeley, Weinberg slips a disc and is bedbound. He reads Chandrasekhar’s stellar physics book, which helped spark his interest in astrophysics. They decide to stay on the San Francisco side of the bay. At that time, Berkeley was the world’s leading center of experimental research on elementary particles and the newly commissioned Bevatron was the latest particle accelerator. Weinberg resolves to do some work that will be useful to Berkeley experimenters and sets about studying muon physics. In Spring 1960, he is offered and accepts a tenure-track position as an assistant professor. He is invited to join JASON, the group of defense consultants. He begins teaching and learns that he loves it. He decides to take a year abroad via an Alfred Sloan Fellowship and he and Louise buy a round-the-world ticket.

In the summer of 1991, Weinberg receives the National Medal of Science from President George H. W. Bush. He describes various visits and internationl trips. Through the early 1990s at the University of Texas at Austin, he taught a course on the quantum theory of fields, which was published as a two-volume treatise on “The Quantum Theory of Fields.” (A third volume on supersymmetry would follow in 2000.) Around this time, he begins publishing popular science in The New York Review of Books. He gives the dedicatory address at the opening of the university’s Hobby–Eberly Telescope.

Disheartened by the cancelation of the Superconducting Super Collider, Weinberg turns his attention to the cosmological constant. It must behave like a vacuum energy density, and can be adjusted to cancel the energy in fluctuating fields. Today the effective vacuum energy density, including the cosmological constant, has come to be called “dark energy.”

Weinberg takes a summer job in the Atomic Beam Group at Princeton, calculating the trajectories of beam particles through the experimental equipment. He describes the culture of close relations of graduate students in physics with the younger faculty and its emphasis on research rather than course work. He details the various courses he took, along with the personalities of the Princeton professors at the time. Sam Treiman agrees to be his PhD advisor for a thesis on strong interactions in decay processes.

Weinberg returns to the “The Cosmological Constant Problem” and suggests an anthropic principle solution. Anthropic reasoning could make it possible for us to calculate the effective vacuum energy. Observations of dark energy in 1998 show that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. This observational result is not inconsistent with the notion of a possible multiverse – the issue has not been settled.

Weinberg collaborates with Ed Witten. He becomes the youngest member of the Saturday Club of Boston. Weinberg signs up to write The Discovery of Subatomic Particles. After their continued separation due to teaching, Weinberg grows to like Austin more and more, with its social scene that crossed from academia into the public sphere. He negotiates with the Universioty of Texas for a position in Austin as the Josey Regental Chair in Science beginning in 1982. He joins the Headliners Club in Austin. Weinberg helps found the Jerusalem Winter School in Theoretical Physics. He begins exploring physical theories in higher dimensions. He attends the Shelter Island Conference in 1983. He is elected to the Philosophical Society of Texas and joined the Town and Gown Club in Austin, but quits the latter over its male-only stance, to help form a rival, the Tuesday Club (of Austin). In mid-1980s, he becomes seriously interested in string theory.