Another bit of sad news today for the physics community, with the passing of Steven Weinberg. He was not only a Nobel Laureate and well respected expert in several branches of theoretical physics, but was also a very talented writer and lecturer who brought modern physics to the general public with his many books and articles.

In the physics community he is best known for being one of the people who unified electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces into a single theory, known as the SU(2) Gauge Theory, which is still the accepted model of two of the three Standard Model forces that describe the interactions of subatomic particles. On a more personal level, he also developed some of the effective field theories that I studied and worked on for my Master's thesis, as well as writing the first textbooks on quantum field theory that I bought and attempted to learn from. 

To those who are interested in the popularization of modern physics, he is best known for his book, The First Three Minutes, that provides an accessible introduction to both particle physics and cosmology. (For those who are wondering, the title refers to the span of time during which our Universe came into existence, expanding, cooled down, formed three separate fundamental forces, and then produced protons and neutrons, before entering the nucleosynthesis stage in which all of the light elements were formed.)

He was 88, and yet still died far too soon.