I heard this morning the news that Steven Weinberg passed away yesterday at the age of 88. He was arguably the dominant figure in theoretical particle physics during its period of great success from the late sixties to the early eighties. In particular, his 1967 work on unification of the weak and electromagnetic interactions was a huge breakthrough, and remains to this day at the center of the Standard Model, our best understanding of fundamental physics. During the years 1975-79 when I was a student at Harvard, I believe the hallway where Weinberg, Glashow and Coleman had offices close together was the greatest concentration of the world’s major figures driving the field of particle theory, with Weinberg seen as the most prominent of the three. From what I recall, in a meeting one of the graduate students (Eddie Farhi?) referred to “Shelly, Sidney and Weinberg”, indicating the way Weinberg was a special case even in that group. I had the great fortune to attend not only Coleman’s QFT course, but also a course by Weinberg on the quantization of gauge theory.