- Person
- Sheldon Glashow
- Lived
- b. 1932
- Field
- Theoretical physics
- From
- American
The story
Sheldon Glashow was born in New York in 1932 to Jewish immigrants from Bobruisk who, he wrote, found in America the freedom and opportunity denied to Jews in Tsarist Russia. His father became a plumber, and Glashow went through the Bronx High School of Science, Cornell University and Harvard, where his doctoral adviser, Julian Schwinger, encouraged his interest in unifying the forces of nature.
Physicists recognised four basic forces: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak force, which causes some kinds of radioactive decay. The weak force seemed completely unlike electromagnetism. It acts only over tiny distances and is far feebler. While working in Copenhagen from 1958 to 1960, Glashow found a way to treat the two as aspects of a single interaction, governed by a symmetry known as SU(2) × U(1). His 1961 paper predicted, besides the photon, heavy particles to carry the weak force, including a new neutral one, now called the Z boson, which would produce a previously unseen kind of weak interaction, the neutral current.
Steven Weinberg, Glashow's high school classmate, and Abdus Salam later showed independently how the weak force carriers could acquire their large masses, and in 1971 Gerard 't Hooft proved the theory consistent. In 1973 experiments at CERN found the first evidence of neutral currents, and in 1979 Glashow, Salam and Weinberg shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1983 CERN discovered the W and Z particles themselves.
The weak force is not remote from everyday life. The Nobel committee noted that the first step in the chain of reactions that powers the Sun is caused by the weak force, that it governs the radioactive decays used in medicine and technology, and that it underlies carbon-14 dating of archaeological remains. Glashow's framework turned it into part of one precise, tested theory.
Why it matters
The electroweak theory is a central pillar of the Standard Model, the framework physicists use to understand the particles and forces behind everything from sunlight to radioactive medicine.
About Sheldon Glashow
Plumber’s son from New York who helped unite electromagnetism and the weak force in the electroweak theory, a pillar of the Standard Model, and predicted the charm quark. Nobel Prize 1979.
Sources
- Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physics 1979 NobelPrize.org
- Sheldon Glashow, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Sheldon Glashow Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.