Steven Weinberg, brilliant particle physicist whose work underpins the ‘Standard Model’ – obituary He won the Nobel Prize after finding fame as a writer with The First Three Minutes (1977), a gripping account of the Big Bang Steven Weinberg Credit: AP Steven Weinberg, who has died aged 88, shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on elementary particles and the interactions between them; his research, uniting two of nature’s fundamental forces – the weak and the electromagnetic – underpins what is known as the “Standard Model” of particle physics, a wildly successful theoretical framework being continuously tested by the Large Hadron Collider.