Sheldon Lee Glashow contributed to the independent work of Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam to develop the electroweak theory, which shows how two fundamental forces--the weak and electromagnetic forces--can be viewed as separate manifestations of a single, more basic force, termed an electroweak force. Among his contributions to the Weinberg-Salam theory was his invention of the property of charm for elementary particles. For his research, he shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics with Weinberg and Salam.
Glashow was born in New York City on December 5, 1932. His parents, Lewis Gluchovski and Bella (Rubin) Gluchovski, had immigrated to New York from Bobruisk, Russia, to avoid anti-Semitic oppression by the Czarist government. Upon his arrival in the United States, the senior Gluchovski changed his name to Glashow and opened a plumbing business that would become very successful. The Glashows had two other sons, 14 and 18 years older than Sheldon; one became a dentist and the other had a career as a doctor.
Embarks on Career in Particle Physics
Glashow attended one of the nation's most prestigious high schools, the Bronx High School of Science. There he claims to have learned as much about physics from his classmates as he did from his instructors. Among those classmates were future fellow Nobel laureate Weinberg and later Columbia physicist Gerald Feinberg. By the time Glashow had graduated from Bronx High in 1950, he had decided his career: he wanted to be a particle physicist.
In order to pursue this goal, Glashow enrolled at Cornell University in the fall of 1950, choosing it in preference to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton. Harvard had denied his application. He later told biographer Arthur Fisher in an interview for the book A Passion to Know that he was not very impressed with the faculty at Cornell. "I spent a good deal of time in the poolroom," he explained. "Most successful people in physics made it by going off by themselves and learning what they wanted to."
After receiving his bachelor's degree from Cornell in 1954, Glashow entered Harvard to do his graduate work. There, he studied under Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger, who was to become a major influence in Glashow's life. His doctoral thesis, "The Vector Meson in Elementary Particle Decay," was a preliminary effort to combine two of the basic forces of nature, the weak and the electromagnetic forces.
Awarded Noble Prize for Electroweak Theory
Efforts to find ways of unifying the four basic forces of nature--the strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational forces--go back to the turn of the twentieth century, especially to the work of Albert Einstein. These efforts are grounded in the belief among most physicists that these four fundamental forces are not actually distinct from each other, but are somehow four different manifestations of a single basic force.
One problem with this assumption is that the unification of forces is thought to be observable only at energies far greater than those encountered in everyday life. The belief is, for example, that the weak and electromagnetic forces actually merge into a single force only at the very high energies produced within particle accelerators. Higher unification may occur only at energies that once existed at the creation of the universe.
Development of unification theories has been, therefore, a highly complex, intricate theoretical exercise that may be testable initially only by checks of internal consistency and only later by experimental studies. In the 1960s, Weinberg and Salam devised such a theory, an explanation of the way in which the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force could be conceived of as manifestations of a single unified force, the electroweak force. That original theory, although very attractive, dealt only with one class of particles, the leptons (electrons and neutrinos).
Shortly after Weinberg and Salam announced their results, Glashow found a method for extending their theory to other elementary particles, such as mesons and baryons. In order to do so, he found it necessary to invent a new property for particles, a property he designated as "charm." In the decade following the formulation of the electroweak theory, experimental evidence supporting the theory gradually began to appear. In 1973, for example, researchers for the first time detected a previously unknown phenomenon known as "neutral currents" that had been predicted by the Salam-Weinberg theory. By 1979, support for the theory had become solid enough to justify the Nobel Prize committee's awarding the physics prize that year to the three researchers.
Since winning the Nobel Prize, Glashow has continued to work on unification theories. Now his goal is to find ways of incorporating the strong force into the electroweak force. He carries out that work at Harvard, where he has been on the faculty since 1966, and at Texas A & M University, where he accepted a joint appointment in 1983. Glashow was married to the former Joan Shirley Alexander in 1972. They have three sons, Jason David, Jordan, and Brian Lewis, and one daughter, Rebecca Lee. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Glashow was awarded the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Medal in 1977, the George Ledlie Prize in 1978, and the Castiglione di Silica Prize in 1983.
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