Can a man work at the very frontier of physics and still hold a deep religious faith — and did Abdus Salam ever feel the two were at war? Did the world’s first Muslim science laureate help build Pakistan’s atomic bomb?
Behind the hundred-hour weeks, Salam was someone who recited Ghalib and Rumi mid-calculation, laughed first at his own jokes, and worked best arguing at a blackboard. We look at whether he “flamed out” after the Nobel (he didn’t — he was still swinging for the biggest prize in physics), and at a private life more unusual than most of his colleagues realised: two marriages, two families, and a British scientist he met at a disarmament meeting.
Then his greatest creation, which wasn’t a theory, but a place. Denied the resources to build a great institute at home, Salam built one abroad instead, a haven where scientists from poor countries could work alongside the best in the world. We ask what it cost him to succeed everywhere except in the one country he built it for.
At the centre of the episode sits the question that still starts arguments: Salam’s real role in Pakistan’s nuclear programme. The official story says he opposed the bomb. A more recent, uncomfortable body of evidence says otherwise. We lay out both cases and the moment in 1974 when a single act of parliament changed everything, and set him against the country he had served.
Around that turning point cluster the threads we follow to the end: his friendships and rivalries across the Indian border; the famous name he’s wrongly linked to; the faith he refused to soften even as his homeland punished him for it.
Hosts: Jacob Koshy and Sobhana K Nair
Producer: Shiksha Jural
Video: Jude Weston
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Published – September 07, 2026 06:00 pm IST
