Dr. Weinberg worked at Columbia University until 1959 and then at the University of California, Berkeley, until 1966, when he became a lecturer at Harvard and a visiting professor at nearby M.I.T. until 1969. M.I.T. then hired him, but he moved back to Harvard in 1973 to become the Higgins professor of physics, succeeding Julian Schwinger, who had won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his contributions to the understanding of particle physics. Dr. Weinberg was also named the senior scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, which is also in Cambridge, Mass., along with Harvard and M.I.T.
Dr. Weinberg married Louise Goldwasser in 1954; they had met as undergraduates at Cornell. In 1980, Ms. Weinberg joined the University of Texas, Austin, as a law professor. For the next two years, she and Dr. Weinberg commuted back and forth from Cambridge as Dr. Weinberg wrapped up his work at Harvard. He joined his wife in Texas in 1982, becoming a professor of physics and astronomy, as he had been at Harvard.
As part of his move, Dr. Weinberg was allowed to create a high-level theoretical physics research group at the University of Texas and to recruit professors for it. It has grown to include eight full professors and five assistant professors and is considered one of the leading centers of physics research in the United States.
Dr. Fischler, who continues to work with the theory group, said of Dr. Weinberg, He had a knack to consider the important problems, but not only what was important, but what was solvable.
Dr. Weinberg, who never retired, continued to teach until the spring this year.
He received many awards and accolades besides the Nobel, including the National Medal of Science in 1991 and the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievement in Science in 2004. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society in Britain. Last year, he received a $3 million award for his contributions to fundamental physics from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, founded by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Sergey Brin of Google and Jack Ma of Alibaba, among others.
In addition to his daughter, a medical doctor, he is survived by his wife and a granddaughter.
Dr. Weinberg opposed religion, believing that it undermined efforts to seek and discover truth. In The First Three Minutes he wrote, Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.
In his interview with the Nobel Institute, he was asked him about his often-quoted line near the end of The First Three Minutes The more that the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
