Weinberg and a New Nuclear Physics

Among Weinberg's many great contributions to physics, the paradigm of effective field theory (EFT) is the deepest. In the early 1990s, Weinberg applied it to nuclear physics, allowing us to overcome the renormalization problems that plagued pion theories since the 1950s. I will review the early developments in Chiral EFT, which underlie the nuclear potentials and currents that currently make the initio of popular ab initio many-body methods. I will also describe the challenges faced by the original approach, which led not only to a better understanding of the interplay between nonperturbative and perturbative physics in Chiral EFT, but also to the development of successful lower-energy theories, such as Pionless EFT and Halo/Cluster EFT. As a consequence, EFTs are now recognized as the framework to describe low-energy nuclear structure and reactions consistently with the underlying theory of the strong interactions, QCD.