Science & Tech Quote by Abdus Salam

Salam’s line is doing diplomatic work in the plain clothes of a scientific truism. On its face, it’s a generous corrective to the lazy story that physics is a Western invention with a few “exotic” footnotes. But the real force is in the insistence on symmetry: “shared heritage,” “all mankind,” then the compass-points march - East and West, North and South - like a roll call meant to shame any reader still sorting genius by latitude.

The intent is partly historical accuracy (Greek geometry and Newtonian mechanics don’t float free of Arabic optics, Indian mathematics, Chinese engineering, or the twentieth-century global laboratory). Yet Salam’s subtext is also personal and political. As a Pakistani Nobel laureate working in elite Western institutions, he understood how quickly scientific authority gets mapped onto civilizational hierarchy. This is a rebuttal to that hierarchy, and a plea: if the past was collaborative, the future must be too.

Context matters. Salam spent immense energy building scientific capacity in the Global South, helping found the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste as a home for researchers from countries locked out by funding, visas, and prestige. So the quote isn’t just about credit; it’s about access. By framing physics as a common inheritance, he quietly argues that no nation gets to behave like the sole heir - or the gatekeeper - of humanity’s most powerful tool for understanding (and reshaping) the world.