Born in Pakistan 100 years ago, Abdus Salam shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for bringing together the myriad of subatomic physics into a common framework, called today the Standard Model. It linked together electromagnetism and the weak forces of radioactive decay, and it incorporated the Higgs mechanism to generate mass.

He had a deep interest in the history of science, and saw it as a shared human endeavour between East and West, North and South. He set up the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste to give researchers in developing countries the stimulus of contact that could have only come otherwise from a move from their homelands to a centre in Europe or the US.

He was Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London for many years, where today Prof. Claudia de Rham directs the Abdus Salam Centre for Theoretical Physics. She explores his life and work, and tells us how he unified the particles of physics and how gravity remains as the great missing piece – and how he saw science as a unifying force in its own right. “Scientific thought and its creation,” he said, “is the common and shared heritage of mankind.”