Pakistan’s first Nobel Prize laureate, Dr Abdus Salam’s residence in Britain has been declared a national heritage site by the government of the United Kingdom.
Founder of the Theoretical Physics Department at Imperial College London, the scientist had stayed in the residence from 1957 till his passing in 1996.
The UK Heritage installed a Blue Plaque outside his former home reading, “Abdus Salam 1926-1996, Physicist, Nobel Laureate and Champion of Science in developing countries, lived here.”
Professor Michael Duff, who completed his PhD under Salam’s supervision in 1972, praised this acknowledgement. “A blue plaque on the house in Putney where he lived for 40 years is a fitting tribute to Nobel Laureate Dr Abdus Salam’s, who was not only one of the finest scientists of the twentieth century, having unified two of the four fundamental forces of nature, but who also dedicated his life to the betterment of science and education in the developing world,” he wrote.
While Professor Ian Walmsley, another one of Salam’s students said, “commitment to science deep, as exemplified by his founding of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, which has the aim of building science capability and capacity in the developing world.”
His son Ahmad Salam went on to reassure that the words on the plaque would’ve made his father quite happy. “For him, above all else, that was the legacy he wanted to impart.”
Professor Salam had bagged the Nobel Prize for his contribution to the electroweak unification theory.
Originally published at Tribune