Sheldon Lee Glashow - Biography

Sheldon Lee Glashow (born December 5, 1932) is a Nobel Prize winning American theoretical physicist. He is the Metcalf Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Boston University.

Birth and education

Sheldon Lee Glashow was born in New York City to Jewish immigrants from Russia. He graduated from Bronx High School of Science in 1950. Glashow was in the same graduating class as Steven Weinberg, whose own research, independent of Glashow's, would result in the two and Abdus Salam sharing the same 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics (see below). Glashow received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University in 1954 and a Ph.D. degree in physics from Harvard University in 1959 under Nobel-laureate physicist Julian Schwinger. After graduation, Glashow joined the University of California, Berkeley 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 Scientists.

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 Weinberg and Abdus Salam, was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics.

In collaboration with James Bjorken, Glashow was the first to predict the charm quark, 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 Georgi 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 Universe 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 Margulis, making Carl Sagan his former brother-in-law. Daniel Kleitman, who was also a doctoral student of Julian Schwinger, 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 in Riffing on Strings: Creative Writing Inspired by String Theory (2008) ISBN 9780980211405

See also

• List of Jewish Nobel laureates
• GIM mechanism

Notes

External links

• Nobel lecture
• Biography and Bibliographic Resources, from the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, United States Department of Energy
• Sheldon Lee Glashow
• Interview with Glashow on Superstrings
• Contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including inter alia the prediction of the weak neutral current.
• Sheldon Glashow Boston University Physics Department
• Sheldon Glashow Photos