Laureate Biography
Sheldon L. Glashow shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam for independently creating and developing the electroweak theory, which unified two of the fundamental forces in nature.
Their theories showed how the weak nuclear interaction, responsible for beta-radioactive decay and for the transformation of hydrogen into helium that allows the Sun to burn, is a different example of the same fundamental force behind electromagnetic interactions.
Glashow was born on 5 December 1932 in Manhattan, New York City, the youngest child of parents who were Jewish immigrants from Belarus. Although his parents were not university educated (his father was a successful plumber), they stressed the importance of such an education to their children.
Glashow was interested in science as a young child, an interest that was encouraged by his parents and particularly his brother Sam, a dentist eighteen years his senior. At the age of 15, his father and Sam set up a small chemistry laboratory for Glashow in their basement.
He attended the Bronx High School of Science, where he first met Steven Weinberg. The two boys would discuss physics during their daily commute on the subway, and they also attended the same classes as undergraduate students at Cornell University. In 1954, Glashow began graduate school at Harvard University, completing his doctorate in 1959. While there, his advisor, the Nobel Laureate Julian Schwinger first placed the idea into Glashow’s head that there could be a unified theory of weak and electromagnetic interactions.
After this, he received an NSF postdoctoral fellowship and he decided to work at the Lebedev Institute in Moscow. However, he was never granted a Russian visa, so he spent the fellowship at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and at CERN in Switzerland.
In 1961, Glashow published a paper that provided the foundation for the theory that the weak and electromagnetic forces are variations of the same electroweak force. His theory could only be applied to leptons, the class of elementary particles that includes electrons and neutrinos; however, in 1964 Abdus Salam independently derived a similar result. Glashow then returned to the United States, working at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for a year before moving to Stanford University as an Assistant Professor and subsequently to the University of California, Berkeley as Associate Professor in 1962.
Glashow accepted the position of Professor of Physics at Harvard University in 1966. While there, he formulated a way of expanding the electroweak theory to include other classes of elementary particles, in particular baryons (which make up protons and neutrons) and mesons. To do so, he proposed the existence of a new member of the quark family, which are the subatomic building blocks used to create baryons and mesons. This new quark, called charmed (later called charm) was discovered in particle accelerator experiments four years later in 1974.
Glashow remained at Harvard until 1982, during which time he visited other institutions as guest professor, including CERN, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Marseilles. He has been affiliated with Boston University since 1984. He married Joan Alexander in 1972, and they have four children.
Nobel Prize in Physics 1979
Sheldon Glashow’s Nobel Lecture
Wikipedia: Sheldon Glashow
