|
|
|
|
My parents,
Lewis Glashow and Bella née Rubin immigrated to New York City from Bobruisk
in the early years of this century. Here they found the freedom and opportunity
denied to Jews in Czarist Russia. After years of struggle, my father became a
successful plumber, and his family could then enjoy the comforts of the middle
class. While my parents never had the time or money to secure university education
themselves, they were adamant that their children should. In comfort and in love,
we were taught the joys of knowledge and of work well done. I only regret that
neither my mother nor my father could live to see the day I would accept the Nobel
Prize.
When I was born in Manhattan in 1932, my brothers Samuel and
Jules were eighteen and fourteen years old. They chose careers of dentistry and
medicine, to my parents' satisfaction. From an early age, I knew I would become
a scientist. It may have been my brother Sam's doing. He interested me in the
laws of falling bodies when I was ten, and helped my father equip a basement chemistry
lab for me when I was fifteen. I became skilled in the synthesis of selenium halides.
Never again would I do such dangerous research. Except for the occasional suggestion
that I should become a physician and do science in my spare time, my parents always
encouraged my scientific inclinations.
Among my chums at the Bronx
High School of Science were Gary Feinberg and Steven Weinberg. We spurred one
another to learn physics while commuting on the New York subway. Another classmate,
Dan Greenberger, taught me calculus in the school lunchroom. High-school mathematics
then terminated with solid geometry. At Cornell University, I again had the good
fortune to join a talented class. It included the mathematician Daniel Kleitman
who was to become my brother-in-law, my old classmate Steven Weinberg, and many
others who were to become prominent scientists. Throughout my formal education,
I would learn as much from my peers as from my teachers. So it is today among
our graduate students.
I came to graduate school at Harvard University
in 1954. My thesis supervisor, Julian Schwinger, had about a dozen doctoral students
at a time. Getting his ear was as difficult as it was rewarding. I called my thesis
"The Vector Meson in Elementary Particle Decays", and it showed an early commitment
to an electroweak synthesis. When I completed my work in 1958, Schwinger and I
were to write a paper summarizing our thoughts on weak-electromagnetic unification.
Alas, one of us lost the first draft of the manuscript, and that was that.
I won an NSF postdoctoral fellowship, and planned to work at the Lebedev
Institute in Moscow with I. Tamm, who enthusiastically supported my proposal.
I spent the tenure of my fellowship in Copenhagen at the Niels Bohr Institute
(and, partly, at CERN), waiting for the Russian visa that was never to come. Perhaps
all was for the best, because it was in these years (1958-60) that I discovered
the SU(2) x U(1) structure of the electroweak theory. Interestingly, it was also
in Copenhagen that my early work on charm with Bjorken was done. This was during
a brief return to Denmark in 1964.
During my stay in Europe, I was
"discovered" by Murray Gell-Mann. He presented my ideas on the algebraic structure
of weak interactions to the 1960 "Rochester meeting" and brought me to Caltech.
Then, he invented the eightfold way, which kept Sidney Coleman and me distracted
for several years. How we found various electromagnetic formulae, yet missed the
discovery of the Gell-Mann-Okubo formula and of the Cabibbo current is another
story.
I 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, I continued to exploit the phenomenological successes of flavor
SU(3) and attempted to understand the departures from exact symmetry as a consequence
of spontane23ous symmetry breakdown. I returned to Harvard University in 1966
where I have remained except for leaves to CERN, MIT, and the University of Marseilles.
Today, I am Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Harvard.
In 1969,
John Iliopoulos and Luciano Maiani came to Harvard as research fellows. Together,
we found the arguments that predicted the existence of charmed hadrons. Much of
my later work was done in collaboration with Alvaro de Rujúla or Howard
Georgi. In early 1974, we predicted that charm would be discovered in neutrino
physics or in e+ e- annihilation. So it was. With the discovery
of the J/Psi particle, we realized that many diverse strands of research were
converging on a single theory of physics. I remember once saying to Howard that
if QCD is so good, it should explain the Sigma-Lambda mass splitting. The next
day he showed that it did. When we spoke, in 1974, of the unification of all elementary
particle forces within a simple gauge group, and of the predicted instability
of the proton, we were regarded as mad. How things change!
The wild
ideas of yesterday quickly become today's dogma. This year I have been honored
to participate in the inauguration of the Harvard Core Curriculum Program. My
students are not, and will never be, scientists. Nonetheless, in my course "From
Alchemy to Quarks" they seem to be as fascinated as I am by the strange story
of the search for the ultimate constituents of matter.
I was married
in 1972 to the former Joan Alexander. We live in a large old house with our four
children, who attend the Brookline public schools.
| Education |
| A.B. 1954, Cornell University |
| A.M. 1955, Harvard University |
| Ph. D. 1959, Harvard University Married 1972 Joan Shirley Alexander |
| Employment |
| NSF Post-Doctoral Fellow 1958-60 |
| Caltech Research Fellow 1960-61 |
| Stanford University, Assistant Professor 1961-62 |
| University of California, Berkeley, Associate Professor 1962-66 |
| Harvard University, Professor 1966-1982 |
| CERN, Visiting Scientist 1968 |
| University of Marseilles, Visiting Professor 1970 |
| MIT, Visiting Professor 1974 |
| Brookhaven Laboratory, Consultant 1964 |
| Texas A&M University, Visiting Professor 1982 |
| University of Houston, Affiliated Senior Scientist, 1982- |
| Boston University, Distinguished Visiting Scientist, 1984- |
| Member |
| American Physical Society |
| Sigma Xi |
| American Association for the Advancement of Science |
| American Academy of Arts and Sciences |
| National Academy of Sciences Honors |
| Westinghouse Science Talent Search Finalist 1950 |
| Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship 1962-66 |
| Oppenheimer Memorial Medal 1977 |
| George Ledlie Award 1978 Honorary Degrees Yeshiva University 1978 |
| University of Aix-Marseille 1982 |
| Adelphi University 1985 |
| Bar-llan University 1988 |
| Gustavus Adolphus College 1989 |
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1979, Editor Wilhelm Odelberg, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1980
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
|
|
| free web hits counter |
This is my BrainyGoose:
United States, IL, Chicago, English, Italian, Genry, Male, 21-25, bodybulding, swiming.
bravenet.com
