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Sheldon Lee Glashow, an American theoretical physicist born on December 5th, 1932, was known amongst others for his notable contribution to the unification of elementary-particle forces. This step represented significant progress in physics as “unification” allowed for the union of seemingly disparate phenomena under the same label. In his case, Glashow investigated elementary-particle forces, three of the four fundamental forces, the electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions. The former is described as “elementary particle forces” due to their strong influence on the subatomic world. However, these three forces were described in extremely disparate ways mathematically, so what Glashow attempted to achieve was to find common mathematical terms in which to describe them.
During his time at Harvard University, where he arrived in 1954, he was oriented towards research on this topic by his mentor, Julian Schwinger. He would complete a Ph.D. thesis on vector bosons (the force carriers described by quantum field theory – the photon for electromagnetism, for example). Thus, Glashow attempted to describe the other forces, such as the weak forces, in this same quantum field theory and vector bosons. A few years later, at Caltech, Glashow published the paper which would eventually, when revised, award him the Nobel Prize in Physics in the year 1979, providing a paradigm for unifying the weak electromagnetic interactions, which he dubbed as the “electroweak unification.”
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His theory, however, did not come without flaws and inconsistencies. It was based on a quantum field theory known as the gauge theory, which contained inaccuracies and failed to address the absence of observation of “neutral” weak interaction, which the theory speculated. Nonetheless, Glashow himself, alongside other notable physicists, came about refining the proposed theory. The inconsistencies of gauge theory were fixed in 1971 by physicists Hooft and Veltman. In contrast, Glashow himself addressed the problem regarding “neutral” weak interactions by basing his rearrangements off ideas put forth by Murray Gell-Mann, introducing the new family of elemental particles: quarks. This collaboration owed him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979, which he shared with Weinberg and Salam. The theories at the foundation of this Nobel Prize came to be a major part of today’s standard model.
