Sheldon Glashow

Sheldon Lee Glashow (born December 5, 1932) is an American theoretical physicist. He shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including the prediction of the weak neutral current. He is the Metcalf Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Boston University and an Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, emeritus, at Harvard University. Glashow is a member of the board of sponsors for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Born in New York City to Jewish immigrants from Russia, Glashow graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1950. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University in 1954 and a PhD in physics from Harvard University in 1959 under Julian Schwinger. He then became a NSF fellow at NORDITA and met Murray Gell-Mann. Glashow became an assistant professor at Stanford University before joining the University of California, Berkeley, where he was an associate professor from 1962 to 1966. He joined the Harvard physics department as a professor in 1966. Glashow has been a visiting scientist at CERN and professor at various other institutions. In 1961, Glashow extended electroweak unification models by including a short-range neutral current, the Z0. The resulting symmetry structure, SU(2) × U(1), forms the basis of the accepted theory of electroweak interactions. In collaboration with James Bjorken, Glashow predicted a fourth quark, the charm quark, in 1964. In 1973, Glashow and Howard Georgi proposed the first Grand Unified Theory, fitting the gauge forces in the Standard Model into an SU(5) Lie group.