In the spring of 1957, the Weinbergs moved to New York for his job at Columbia University, where important experimental work had taken place throught the 1950s. He writes some (largely unimportant) papers on symmetry principles and weak interactions. His first encounter with Murray Gell-Mann gets off to a rocky start. Weinberg starts building a network of colleagues and friends. He misses the chance of tenure at Columbia, so rather than stay for another year as a postdoc, he decides to take up a research position at Berkeley. Before he leaves, he submits his paper on renormalization and infinities.

Shortly after moving to Berkeley, Weinberg slips a disc and is bedbound. He reads Chandrasekhar’s stellar physics book, which helped spark his interest in astrophysics. They decide to stay on the San Francisco side of the bay. At that time, Berkeley was the world’s leading center of experimental research on elementary particles and the newly commissioned Bevatron was the latest particle accelerator. Weinberg resolves to do some work that will be useful to Berkeley experimenters and sets about studying muon physics. In Spring 1960, he is offered and accepts a tenure-track position as an assistant professor. He is invited to join JASON, the group of defense consultants. He begins teaching and learns that he loves it. He decides to take a year abroad via an Alfred Sloan Fellowship and he and Louise buy a round-the-world ticket.