The trip first takes in Japan, then Hong Kong, and Singapore. In Singapore, he loses a case containing all of his notes, and learns to lecture without them. He visits some Indian institutes and then flies to Israel. After tourist stopovers in Istanbul and Athens, they arrive finally in London as guests of Abdus Salam. He begins work on a research project on bound states in strong forces, which leads nowhere. He gives invited talks throughout the UK. They spend some time in Italy before attending the Rochester Conference of 1962, in Geneva. Weinberg receives news that he has been promoted to associate professor. They return to New York via Lisbon, after 280 days away.

In the 1980s, two groups of physicists in Europe and America began to lay plans for a high energy proton accelerator that could settle the question of electroweak symmetry breaking. In 1984, Weinberg is appointed to the SSC Board of Overseers, and this work would occupy his time for much of the next decade. Weinberg testifies before Congress in favor of the SSC project and starts to appreciate the role of pork-barrel politics in the siting decisions. The Texas site of Waxahachie, near Dallas, is approved in 1988. The project’s construction funding is approved but faces ongoing challenges from other competing areas of science. Changes in the specifications, required by the science goals, lead to increases in the costs, resulting in bad press. In 1993, the funding was cut, and the SSC was killed off. Weinberg writes a successful trade book, Dreams of a Final Theory.