UNTIL I read Gordon Fraser’s excellent Cosmic Anger I knew just two things about the Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam: he won the Nobel prize for physics in 1979 for his part in developing the electroweak theory which unifies two of the four forces of nature, and he founded the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, to support researchers from developing countries.
Actually, let me add a third fact that I was vaguely aware of but which crystallised after reading this biography: Salam stands as the greatest physicist of the Islamic world for 1000 years. Not since the 11th-century…
