Doctor Steven Weinberg was an American theoretical physicist who received numerous distinctions throughout his career, including the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979, and the National Medal for Science in 1991. Weinberg was born in New York city in 1933 and from an early age, he had an interest in theoretical physics and astrophysics. He earned his undergraduate degree from Cornell, went on to study at both the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen and Princeton, and later worked and lectured in many universities, including Columbia, Berkeley, Harvard, and MIT. In 1967, on a visit to MIT, he began to focus his studies on the unification of weak and electromagnetic interactions. He wrote a paper called “A Model of Leptons” that discussed the idea of spontaneous symmetry breaking and how that caused W and Z bosons to seem as if they were massive at low energy levels. The propositions in the paper were highly complicated, and for that reason, the paper received very few citations and praise until Gerard t’Hooft, a Dutch physicist and professor, wrote a paper in 1970 that proved that Weinberg’s model was renormalizable; soon after, the paper became very popular in the physics community. Weinberg also contributed to the studies of cosmology and astrophysics, conducting research about matter-antimatter asymmetry and the cosmological constant.

After earning the Nobel Prize, Weinberg and his wife moved to Austin in the 1980s, where they both worked at UT Austin as professors. Unfortunately, Weinberg passed away on July 23rd, 2021 in Austin at the age of 88. His contributions to theoretical physics and his discoveries about the basic forces of life remain vital to the scientific community.

Masatoshi Koshiba was a Japanese physicist who was born in a seaside town called Toyohashi. He grew to love mathematics and physics and attended a prestigious boarding school in Tokyo. One day, when considering studying German literature, Koshiba switched his focus to a physics program to prove a teacher who flunked him wrong. He studied physics at university, but his family had financial troubles, and he was forced to work long hours as well as do his schoolwork. A connection he gained through his school granted him access to a graduate scholarship at the University of Rochester, where he earned his PHD in just two years. After spending a few decades doing research around the world, he returned to Tokyo, where he began his work on neutrinos. In the late 1960s, scientist Raymond Davis developed the first technology to capture solar neutrinos with a detector, but he recorded less neutrinos than expected. In 1990, Koshiba’s own detectors in the town of Kamioka had proved Davis’ work correct, yet the issue remained that they detected less than expected. In 1998, one of Koshiba’s graduate students made the discovery that neutrinos change forms, and some of those forms elude the detectors, explaining the differences in the measured neutrinos and the expected numbers. This was a major step in proving that the sun's energy comes from nuclear reactions. Along with Davis, Koshiba earned the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics for the detection of cosmic neutrinos.

Koshiba faced an endless amount of hardships and financial troubles in his life, yet he never gave up on his dream; now, his research is a foundation of the study of the sun and its energy.