Sheldon Lee Glashow is a
Nobel PrizeThe Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded once a year by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895 and awarded since 1901; the others are the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Nobel Prize in Literature, Nobel Peace Prize, and...
winning
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
theoreticalTheoretical physics is a branch of physics which employs mathematical models and abstractions of physics to rationalize, explain and predict natural phenomena...
physicistPhysics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
. He is the
MetcalfMetcalf Center for Science and Engineering is a building owned by Boston University and named for Arthur G.B. Metcalf. Metcalf founded what would later become the university's engineering college and served as its chair. He also donated millions of dollars toward the construction of the building...
ProfessorA professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...
of
MathematicsMathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
and
PhysicsPhysics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
at
Boston UniversityBoston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...
.
Birth and education
Sheldon Lee Glashow was born in
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
to Jewish immigrants from
RussiaRussia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
. He graduated from
Bronx High School of ScienceThe Bronx High School of Science is a specialized New York City public high school often considered the premier science magnet school in the United States. Founded in 1938, it is now located in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx...
in 1950. Glashow was in the same graduating class as
Steven WeinbergSteven Weinberg is an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles....
, whose own research, independent of Glashow's, would result in the two and
Abdus SalamMohammad Abdus Salam, NI, SPk Mohammad Abdus Salam, NI, SPk Mohammad Abdus Salam, NI, SPk (Urdu: محمد عبد السلام, pronounced , (January 29, 1926– November 21, 1996) was a Pakistani theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his work on the electroweak unification of the...
sharing the same 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics (see below). Glashow received a
Bachelor of ArtsA Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
degree from
Cornell UniversityCornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
in 1954 and a Ph.D. degree in physics from
Harvard UniversityHarvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
in 1959 under Nobel-laureate physicist
Julian SchwingerJulian Seymour Schwinger was an American theoretical physicist. He is best known for his work on the theory of quantum electrodynamics, in particular for developing a relativistically invariant perturbation theory, and for renormalizing QED to one loop order.Schwinger is recognized as one of the...
. After graduation, Glashow joined the
University of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
and worked as an Associate Professor from 1962-66. He was a visiting professor at MIT in 1974.
Glashow is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The
Bulletin of the Atomic ScientistsThe Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a nontechnical online magazine that covers global security and public policy issues, especially related to the dangers posed by nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction...
.
Research
In 1961, Glashow extended electroweak unification models due to Schwinger by including a short range neutral current, the Z0. The resulting symmetry structure that Glashow proposed, SU(2) × U(1), forms the basis of the accepted theory of the electroweak interactions. For this discovery, Glashow along with
Steven WeinbergSteven Weinberg is an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles....
and
Abdus SalamMohammad Abdus Salam, NI, SPk Mohammad Abdus Salam, NI, SPk Mohammad Abdus Salam, NI, SPk (Urdu: محمد عبد السلام, pronounced , (January 29, 1926– November 21, 1996) was a Pakistani theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his work on the electroweak unification of the...
, was awarded the 1979
Nobel Prize in PhysicsThe Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded once a year by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895 and awarded since 1901; the others are the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Nobel Prize in Literature, Nobel Peace Prize, and...
.
In collaboration with
James BjorkenJames Daniel "BJ" Bjorken is one of the world's foremost theoretical physicists. He was a Putnam Fellow in 1954, received a BS in physics from MIT in 1956, and obtained his PhD from Stanford University in 1959...
, Glashow was the first to predict the
charm quarkThe charm quark or c quark is the third most massive of all quarks, a type of elementary particle. Charm quarks are found in hadrons, which are subatomic particles made of quarks...
, which he originally named the "charmed quark", in 1964. This work showed that the quark pairs would largely cancel out flavor changing neutral currents, as well as removing a technical disaster for any quantum field theory with unequal numbers of quarks and leptons- an anomaly.
In 1973, Glashow and
Howard GeorgiHoward Mason Georgi III, born January 6, 1947 in San Bernardino, California, is Harvard College Professor and Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University...
proposed the first grand unified theory. They discovered how to fit the gauge forces in the standard model into an SU(5) group, and the quarks and leptons into two simple representations. Their theory qualitatively predicted the general pattern of coupling constant running, with plausible assumptions, it gave rough mass ratio values between third generation leptons and quarks, and it was the first indication that the law of Baryon number is inexact, that the proton is unstable. This work was the foundation for all future unifying work.
Superstring theory
Glashow is a skeptic of Superstring theory due to its lack of experimentally testable predictions. He had campaigned to keep string theorists out of the Harvard physics department, though the campaign failed. About ten minutes into "Strings the Thing", the second episode of
The Elegant UniverseThe Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory is a book by Brian Greene published in 1999, which introduces string and superstring theory, and provides a comprehensive though non-technical assessment of the theory and some of its shortcomings...
TV series, he describes superstring theory as a discipline distinct from physics, saying "...you may call it tumor, if you will...".
Personal
Glashow is married to the former Joan Alexander. They have four children. Joan's sister is
Lynn MargulisLynn Margulis was an American biologist and University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is best known for her theory on the origin of eukaryotic organelles, and her contributions to the endosymbiotic theory, which is now generally accepted...
, making
Carl SaganCarl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, science popularizer and science communicator in astronomy and natural sciences. He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books...
his former brother-in-law.
Daniel KleitmanDaniel J. Kleitman is a professor of applied mathematics at MIT. His research interests include combinatorics, graph theory, genomics, and operations research.- Biography :...
, who was also a doctoral student of
Julian SchwingerJulian Seymour Schwinger was an American theoretical physicist. He is best known for his work on the theory of quantum electrodynamics, in particular for developing a relativistically invariant perturbation theory, and for renormalizing QED to one loop order.Schwinger is recognized as one of the...
, is his brother-in-law, through Joan's other sister.
Works
- The charm of physics (1991) ISBN 0-88318-708-6
- From alchemy to quarks: the study of physics as a liberal art (1994) ISBN 0-534-16656-3
- Interactions: a journey through the mind of a particle physicist and the matter of this world (1988) ISBN 0-446-51315-6
- First workshop on grand unification: New England Center, University of New Hampshire, April 10–12, 1980 edited with Paul H. Frampton and Asim Yildiz (1980) ISBN 0-915692-31-7
- Third Workshop on Grand Unification, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, April 15–17, 1982 edited with Paul H. Frampton and Hendrik van Dam (1982) ISBN 3-7643-3105-4
- "Desperately Seeking Superstrings?" with Paul Ginsparg
Paul Ginsparg is a physicist widely known for his development of the ArXiv.org e-print archive and for contributions to theoretical physics.-Career in physics:...
in Riffing on Strings: Creative Writing Inspired by String Theory (2008) ISBN 9780980211405
External links