Remembering Abdus Salam

I never met Abdus Salam, but at the Abdus Salam International Center
for Theoretical Physics (AS-ICTP), where we all convened a year after
his death, his presence in spirit was undeniable. We were all there,
the "extended family of Salam", to pay homage to a person who
influenced us in different ways: scientists from all around the world
who had worked with Salam and who knew Salam as one of the architects
of the fundamental laws of physics, scientists from the Third World in
particular for whom Salam was like a father figure who helped the
spread of science and knowledge in their countries, bureaucrats and
government officials with whom he successfully negotiated the
inception and funding of AS-ICTP against impossible odds, policy
makers who were guided by his far reaching visions for education and
development, members of the local government of Trieste who wanted to
celebrate the life of their world-famous "adopted" citizen and even
the president of Albania, a physics professor, who came to share his
experience of Abdus Salam with us. And then there were people like me
who understood modern physics in terms of the Electroweak Theory of
Salam, Glashow and Weinberg, but never got a chance to work with
him. We were attracted by the continuing legacy of Salam -specialized
talks on a wide spectrum of research problems at the forefront of
physics.



All of us knew that Salam was one of the greatest scientists of this
century, but not all of us really appreciated the full extent of his
genius. As the conference went along, we were amazed at his
versatility and sheer energy. His old colleagues at Imperial College
recalled that he was a full-time contributor to the department,
supervising five or six students, meeting with them almost daily, and
constantly working on new ideas and writing papers. He was a
prodigiously productive physicist and a demanding advisor to his
students. What they did not realize was that Salam, at the same time,
was also the science advisor for President Ayub Khan and was deeply
immersed in policy making for Pakistan. During those days, he went on
to establish the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission and SUPARCO to name
just two. Later on, he also became actively involved in founding an
international center for science and technology. Lobbying for what is
now AS-ICTP was not easy. He had to deal with procuring funding and
support for a project that was deemed unnecessary by many of his
Western scientific peers. Some of them actively opposed the idea
citing reasons that were blatantly racist. But in the end, the Center
was established, and has for more than three decades now, been an
unparalleled forum for exchange of ideas and cultures.

As the conference drew to a conclusion, I spent a day in the office of
Abdus Salam, going through his collected papers, his books, various
news clippings about his life and the letters of condolence sent by
people from all across the globe upon his death.

His scientific papers traced the historical route taken by modern
physics, which to me was not surprising. He had worked on and made
seminal contributions to many key concepts of particle physics
-renormalization, parity violation, electroweak unification,
supersymmetry, leptoquarks, grand unification and superstrings. His
Nobel Prize recognized only one of these: electroweak unification. To
call his mind "fecund" would be an understatement -his papers are an
irresistable flood of ideas. Many of his colleagues recalled the
contagious excitement of Salam whenever he had a new idea, which was
very often, probably too often for some. There were no barriers to his
mind, Salam was a perennial learner and an ardent student until the
sunset of his life. Miguel Virasoro, who succeeded Salam as the
director of AS-ICTP, went to visit Salam not long before he
died. Salam was very sick, and had extreme difficulty expressing
himself. Virasoro decided to tell Salam about his own latest work, not
sure whether Salam in his condition would be able to appreciate
it. However, as Virasoro spoke, he could see the expressive eyes of
Salam reacting to all that he was saying. Once he was done, Salam
mustered all of his strength, and said, "But what about gravity?"
Even his debilitating terminal illness could not tarnish his
exceptional ability to see through to the heart of a problem.

His collection of books encompassed a vast spectrum. Apart from the
books on physics, mathematics, biology and other scientific
disciplines, he had a collection of books on all the major religions
of the world, various philosophical works, works of literature from
different cultures, histories of different parts of the world, works
on different kinds of policy making and studies of various aspects of
societies across the world. In terms of religion and the
"metaphysical" aspects of life, it was clear that he had done a
thorough comparative study. That gave him an insight into the
motivations and desires deep within the human soul. His own personal
beliefs gave him a conviction that could guide him through any
circumstance. Prominently displayed in his office is a large Arabic
inscription "Naad-e-Aliyan Mazhar-ul-Ajaib" or an invocation of the
help of Hadrat Ali in the manifestation of miracles. This scientist
believed. Also, perhaps it is not surprising that Salam had a
passion for literature, the distinction between "science" and "art" is
really quite arbitrary, especially for a keen mind as his. His
exceptional intellect and his intellectual versatility gave him an
understanding of the human side of affairs which is rare, not just in
specialized scientists, but in people of all backgrounds. Salam had
the tools to perform miracles.

His life, judging from the collection of various news clippings and
photographs, had taken him a long way. A small kid in an oversized
turban from an unknown village in Punjab had grown to become a maestro
who would claim his place in the top echelons of global intellectual
community -an elitist community with many subscribers to the
colonialistic mindset. As Nigel Calder, the famous science writer from
Britain, pointed out, Salam's life is like "a fantasy straight out of
a story-book". He wished that Pakistani children should grow up reading
story books about a hero named Abdus Salam, and through him they would
find confidence in their own abilities, and have high aspirations
about their own futures. The life of this hero was shaped by a will
that could defy all odds. And in the process, he gave a lot in return
to others. One of the most poignant moments in Salam's life was when
he had to leave Pakistan in order to pursue his interest in
physics. He desired that no young scientist from a Third World country
should ever have to make a choice between his homeland and his
interest in the sciences. This was one of the causes that he gave to
freely. During his life and after his death, people found themselves
celebrating his services: little kids in a Peruvian village, who
followed him around shouting "El Nobelo, El Nobelo", scores of awards
and honorary degrees from universities and governments throughout the
world, his students who went on to found centers of advanced learning
throughout the under-previlged parts of the world, Salam-Fest's
organized by scientists, the outpouring of grief over his demise.

At the end of the day, I realized, that for Salam, all of these
endeavours and achievements were not an end in themselves, but a means
to an end. His life was a manifestation of his convictions and his
understanding of his roots.

In the main lecture hall of AS-ICTP, there is a large framed
picture entitled "The Silent Genocide". One half of the picture is a
painting which shows a soldier involved in the sacking of a city. His
sword is raised high above his head, ready to strike down on a baby
lying on the floor. The mother is desperately trying to save her baby
by imploring to the soldier. The other half of the picture contains an
abstract of Salam's Red Book , which he used to publish
annually under the umbrella of the Third World Academy of Sciences:


This globe of ours is inhabited by two distinct species of
humans. According to UNDP count of 1987, one quarter of mankind, some
1.2 billion people are developed. They inhabit two-fifths of the land area
of the earth and control 80% of the world's natural resources, while
3.8 billion developing humans -"Les Miserable" -the "mustazeffin" (the
deprived ones) -live on the remaining three-fifths of the globe.


What distinguishes one species of human from the other is the
ambition, the power, the elan which basically stems from their
differing mastery and utilization of present day Science and
Technology.


Salam believed that the present divide between the scientific and
technological achievements of the (rich) Northern and (poor) Southern
nations was a result of the concentration of economic power in the
hands of a few nations after the Industrial Revolution[1]. Even after the
dismantling of the colonial empires, and the emerging of the Third
World, the situation was not corrected. First of all, the ruthless
exploitation of the poor countries continues unchecked in many
forms. And second, the widening economic disparity between the rich
and the poor also leads to an ever widening scientific and technological
gap which in turn further widens the economic gap. This, he believed,
constituted "the silent genocide" of the poor by the rich.

In an article titled, "Diseases of the Rich and Diseases of the Poor",
which was published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
in April 1963, he wrote:


Year after year I have seen cotton crop from my village in Pakistan
fetch less and less money; year after year imported fertilizer has
cost more. My economist friend tells me that terms of trade are
against us. Between 1955 and 1962 the commodity prices fell by 7%. In
the same period, the manufactured goods went up by 10%. Some
courageous men have spoken against this. Paul Hoffman called it a
subsidy, a contribution paid by the under-developed countries to the
industrialized world. In 1957-58 the under-developed world received a
total of $2.4 billion in aid and lost $2 billion in import capacity
through paying more for the manufactured goods it buys and getting
less for the raw commodities it sells...


...It was in 1956 that I remember I heard for the first time of the
scandal of commodity prices -of a continuous downward trend in the
prices of what we produced, with violent fluctuations superposed,
while industrial prices of goods we imported went equally inexorably
up as a consequence of the welfare and security policies the developed
countries had instituted within their own societies. All this was
called Market Economics. And when we did build up manufacturing
industries with expensively imported machinery -for example cotton
cloth -stiff tariff barriers were raised against their imports from
us. With our cheaper labour, we were accused of unfair practices...


...In 1970, the world's richest one billion earned an income of $3,000
per person per year; the world's poorest one billion no more than $100
each. And the awful part of it is that there is absolutely nothing in
sight -no mechanisms whatsoever -which can stop this
disparity. Development on the traditional pattern -the market
economics -is expected to increase the $100 per capita of the poor too
all of $103 by 1980, while the $3,000 earned by the rich will grow to
$4,000 -that is, an increase of $3 against $1,000 over an entire
decade.


Salam believed there were two necessary steps to stop this
ever-growing disparity between the rich and the poor. First, a
dedicated system of aid from the rich countries to the poor. This aid
would not only foster economic growth and inter-dependence between the
rich and the poor (with benefits to both), but also compensate for the
past and present exploitation of the poor countries. It would also
account for the unequal distribution of natural resources between the
rich and the poor. Linus Pauling, twice Nobel laureate, had initially
sketched out a scheme at the Nobel Symposioum in 1969. He had
suggested a transfer of $200 billion per year from the rich to the
poor countries, roughly 8% of then world GDP and suggested heavy
cut-backs in the defense spending around the world, to free resources
for global development. Pauling's proposal in turn inspired Salam to
espouse the same idea. Unfortunately, Pauling's idea was deemed too
idealistic for implementation at the time, even though it won many
advocates within and outside scientific circles.

The second necessary step, was sketched out by Salam in his address at
the 13th Annual All-Pakistan Science Conference in Dhaka (1961)
[emphasis added by the author]:


I have mentioned technological skills and capital as the two
pre-requisites before a pre-industrial society like ours can crash
through the poverty barrier. Actually there is a third and even more
important pre-requisite. And that is the National Resolve to
do so. In Professor Rostow's words, nation's take off into sustained
growth awaits not only the buildup of social overhead capital -capital
invested in communication networks, schools, technical institutes
... but it also needs the emergence to political power of a group
prepared to regard the modernization of the economy as a serious high
order political business. Such was the case with Germany with the
revolution in 1848, such was the case with Japan with the Meiji
Restoration of 1868, such was the case with Russian and Chinese
Revolutions. Our independence in 1947 did not -definitely did not
-coincide with the emergence of a political class which made economic
growth the center piece of state policy. I can still recall the
interminable arguments, conducted in private and public, in the early
years of Pakistan about ideology. Never did I hear the mention of
total eradication of poverty as one of the priority ideological
functions of the new State.


To Salam, poverty was "synonymous with kufr", or a heinous
sin. Poverty is engendered by population explosion and depletion of
global resources. Poverty in turn causes the decline of science and
technology and further widens the gap between the rich and the
poor. Eradication of poverty, therefore, has to be a part of the state
policy.

Today, as we remember Abdus Salam, we realize the long road Pakistan
has travelled in the last 50 years. There have been many successes and
many failures. If Salam were to return to his small village close to
Jhang today, he would probably notice that a lot has changed since he
first left his village about sixty years ago. On the other hand, he
would also bemoan the fact that not enough has changed, and that we
could have done much better. Perhaps, the best way to remember Salam
is then to learn from what we have experienced as a nation, and
understand that our collective will as a nation is an agent of
change, and we have to exercise our will to improve our lot. If for no
other reason, at least for all the Abdus Salams, born in the backward
areas of Pakistan, who are mercilessly devoured by poverty.

References:
Abdus Salam -A biography by Jagjit Singh, Penguin Books, 1992.