Collected Works of Irshadullah Khan (Complete Works of Irshadullah Khan)

Irshadullah Khan was born in Pakistan on July 28, 1940 and died in Pakistan on January 6, 2020. Much of the intervening 80 years of his life was devoted to physics. Born the eldest of nine siblings to a Pashtun family of very limited means in a remote and rural Pakistani village, the odds were stacked against Irshadullah from the beginning. And yet, despite any disadvantages of birth and circumstance, he persevered, studying theoretical physics at Cambridge and Edinburgh. He worked as a theoretical physicist at universities in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Oman, the Bahamas, North Cyprus, and Turkey. He had an encyclopedic recall of biographies of historical scientists and aspired to live a life similarly devoted to science. He considered Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) unsung heroes and admired Srinivasa Ramanujan and Abdus Salam. Of Isaac Newton and Michael Faraday he spoke with awe. He spoke with gratitude of Paul Dirac and Peter Higgs, who he had as teachers.

Irshadullah’s curiosity, creativity, and dedication to scientific inquiry were inexhaustible, particularly in relation to physics. He produced the formidable and diverse body of work collected in this volume. In addition to his published papers compiled in the first half of this volume, the work in the second half are manuscripts that have not previously appeared in print. On his death, Irshadullah Khan left behind hundreds of pages of handwritten “calculations” and dozens of draft manuscripts, which he had resisted making public until “the work” was “finished.”