Abdus Salam : the dream of symmetry

Particle Physics in the XX century and the scientific path of Abdus Salam. In Jhang, a small town in the Punjab, one night a man dreamt that his child was climbing high up on a tree, so high that soon he seemed to disappear into the blue sky. The name of the child was Abdus Salam, that means ’Servant of Peace’, who was going to win in 1979 the Nobel Prize in Physics for his groundbreaking advances in our understanding of the laws of Nature. But not only was he a great scientist, he was also a visionary and humanitarian. With a burning concern, fired by is unhappiness at having to leave his own country for pursuing higher research, Abdus Salam always tried to find ways to make science the common and shared heritage of all mankind. From a remote village in Pakistan to the prestigious colleges of Cambridge, from the exciting atmosphere of London to the charming seaside of Trieste, where Abdus Salam founded the International Centre for Theoretical Physics. This is the engaging story of his life and, at the same time, the fascinating account of one of the most creative and exciting periods of discovery in the history of physics: the dream of a unified theory of elementary particles and fundamental forces in Nature.