Ten Nobels for the future

Sheldon Lee Glashow was born in New York in 1932. From an early age, he knew he would become a scientist.

At the Bronx High School of Science, his classmates were Gary Feinberg and Steven Weinberg and they spurred one another to learn physics while commuting on the New York subway. At Cornell University, he again had the good fortune to join a talented class. It included the mathematician Daniel Kleitman who was to become his brother-in-law, Steven Weinberg, and many others future prominent scientists. In 1954 he went to graduate school at Harvard University where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1959: his thesis supervisor was Julian Schwinger.

From 1958 to 1960, he spent a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship in Copenhagen at the Niels Bohr Institute (and, partly, at CERN), and discovered the SU(2) x U(1) structure of the electroweak theory.

During his stay in Europe, he was "discovered" by Murray Gell-Mann who presented his ideas on the algebraic structure of weak interactions to the 1960 "Rochester meeting" and brought him to Caltech.

In 1961, Sheldon Lee Glashow became an assistant professor at Stanford University and then spent several years on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley. During this time, he continued to exploit the phenomenological successes of flavor SU(3) and attempted to understand the departures from exact symmetry as a consequence of spontaneous symmetry breakdown.

In 1966 he returned to Harvard University, where he has remained except for leaves to CERN, MIT, and the University of Marseilles and where he is Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics.

In 1969, with John Iliopoulos and Luciano Maiani, he found the arguments that predicted the existence of charmed hadrons. Much of his later work was done in collaboration with Alvaro de Rujúla or Howard Georgi. In early 1974, they predicted that charm would be discovered in neutrino physics or in e+ e- annihilation. So it was. They were also discussing the unification of all elementary particle forces within a simple gauge group, and they predicted instability of the proton. They "were regarded as mad. How things change!"

In 1979, Sheldon Glashow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Abdus Salam and his classmate Steven Weinberg "for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including inter alia the prediction of the weak neutral current".

"Inter alia", Sheldon Glashow has collected many honours and honorary degrees, written memorable essays collected in The Charm of Physics (New York, Springer, 1991). He has been and still is a member of several Societies, Boards and Advisory Committees, and is rumoured to have chaired in 1995 the Ig-Nobel Prize celebrations in Harvard.

1997
Past and future virtues
of curiosity-driven research

1999
Can science save the world?