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به نشریه الکترونیکی سی. پی. اچ.

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Nobel 1979

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Towards a Unified Theory – Threads in a Tapestry

Gauge Unification of Fundamental Forces

Conceptual Foundations of the Unified Theory of Weak and Electromagnetic Interactions

"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"

Sheldon Lee Glashow	Abdus Salam	Steven Weinberg

1/3 of the prize	1/3 of the prize	1/3 of the prize
USA	Pakistan	USA
Harvard University, Lyman Laboratory Cambridge, MA, USA	International Centre for Theoretical Physics Trieste, Italy; Imperial College London, United Kingdom	Harvard University Cambridge, MA, USA
b. 1932	b. 1926 d. 1996	b. 1933

Autobiography: Sheldon Lee Glashow

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

Biography: Abdus Salam

Abdus Salam was born in Jhang, a small town in what is now Pakistan, in 1926. His father was an official in the Department of Education in a poor farming district. His family has a long tradition of piety and learning.

When he cycled home from Lahore, at the age of 14, after gaining the highest marks ever recorded for the Matriculation Examination at the University of the Punjab, the whole town turned out to welcome him. He won a scholarship to Government College, University of the Punjab, and took his MA in 1946. In the same year he was awarded a scholarship to St. John's College, Cambridge, where he took a BA (honours) with a double First in mathematics and physics in 1949. In 1950 he received the Smith's Prize from Cambridge University for the most outstanding pre-doctoral contribution to physics. He also obtained a PhD in theoretical physics at Cambridge; his thesis, published in 1951, contained fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics which had already gained him an international reputation.

Salam returned to Pakistan in 1951 to teach mathematics at Government College, Lahore, and in 1952 became head of the Mathematics Department of the Punjab University. He had come back with the intention of founding a school of research, but it soon became clear that this was impossible. To pursue a career of research in theoretical physics he had no alternative at that time but to leave his own country and work abroad. Many years later he succeeded in finding a way to solve the heartbreaking dilemma faced by many young and gifted theoretical physicists from developing countries. At the ICTP, Trieste, which he created, he instituted the famous "Associateships" which allowed deserving young physicists to spend their vacations there in an invigorating atmosphere, in close touch with their peers in research and with the leaders in their own field, losing their sense of isolation and returning to their own country for nine months of the academic year refreshed and recharged.

In 1954 Salam left his native country for a lectureship at Cambridge, and since then has visited Pakistan as adviser on science policy. His work for Pakistan has, however, been far-reaching and influential. He was a member of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, a member of the Scientific Commission of Pakistan and was Chief Scientific Adviser to the President from 1961 to 1974.

Since 1957 he has been Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College, London, and since 1964 has combined this position with that of Director of the ICTP, Trieste.

For more than forty years he has been a prolific researcher in theoretical elementary particle physics. He has either pioneered or been associated with all the important developments in this field, maintaining a constant and fertile flow of brilliant ideas. For the past thirty years he has used his academic reputation to add weight to his active and influential participation in international scientific affairs. He has served on a number of United Nations committees concerned with the advancement of science and technology in developing countries.

To accommodate the astonishing volume of activity that he undertakes, Professor Salam cuts out such inessentials as holidays, parties and entertainments. Faced with such an example, the staff of the Centre find it very difficult to complain that they are overworked.

He has a way of keeping his administrative staff at the ICTP fully alive to the real aim of the Centre - the fostering through training and research of the advancement of theoretical physics, with special regard to the needs of developing countries. Inspired by their personal regard for him and encouraged by the fact that he works harder than any of them, the staff cheerfully submit to working conditions that would be unthinkable here at the (International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna (IAEA). The money he received from the Atoms for Peace Medal and Award he spent on setting up a fund for young Pakistani physicists to visit the ICTP. He uses his share of the Nobel Prize entirely for the benefit of physicists from developing countries and does not spend a penny of it on himself or his family.

Abdus Salam is known to be a devout Muslim, whose religion does not occupy a separate compartment of his life; it is inseparable from his work and family life. He once wrote: "The Holy Quran enjoins us to reflect on the verities of Allah's created laws of nature; however, that our generation has been privileged to glimpse a part of His design is a bounty and a grace for which I render thanks with a humble heart."

Autobiography: Steven Weinberg

I was born in 1933 in New York City to Frederick and Eva Weinberg. My early inclination toward science received encouragement from my father, and by the time I was 15 or 16 my interests had focused on theoretical physics.

I received my undergraduate degree from Cornell in 1954, and then went for a year of graduate study to the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen (now the Niels Bohr Institute). There, with the help of David Frisch and Gunnar Källén. I began to do research in physics. I then returned to the U.S. to complete my graduate studies at Princeton. My Ph.D thesis, with Sam Treiman as adviser, was on the application of renormalization theory to the effects of strong interactions in weak interaction processes.

After receiving my Ph.D. in 1957, I worked at Columbia and then from 1959 to 1966 at Berkeley. My research during this period was on a wide variety of topics - high energy behavior of Feynman graphs, second-class weak interaction currents, broken symmetries, scattering theory, muon physics, etc. - topics chosen in many cases because I was trying to teach myself some area of physics. My active interest in astrophysics dates from 1961-62; I wrote some papers on the cosmic population of neutrinos and then began to write a book, Gravitation and Cosmology, which was eventually completed in 1971. Late in 1965 I began my work on current algebra and the application to the strong interactions of the idea of spontaneous symmetry breaking.

From 1966 to 1969, on leave from Berkeley, I was Loeb Lecturer at Harvard and then visiting professor at M.I.T. In 1969 I accepted a professorship in the Physics Department at M.I.T., then chaired by Viki Weisskopf. It was while I was a visitor to M.I.T. in 1967 that my work on broken symmetries, current algebra, and renormalization theory turned in the direction of the unification of weak and electromagnetic interactions. In 1973, when Julian Schwinger left Harvard, I was offered and accepted his chair there as Higgins Professor of Physics, together with an appointment as Senior Scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

My work during the 1970's has been mainly concerned with the implications of the unified theory of weak and electromagnetic interactions, with the development of the related theory of strong interactions known as quantum chromodynamics, and with steps toward the unification of all interactions.

In 1982 I moved to the physics and astronomy departments of the University of Texas at Austin, as Josey Regental Professor of Science. I met my wife Louise when we were undergraduates at Cornell, and we were married in 1954. She is now a professor of law. Our daughter Elizabeth was born in Berkeley in 1963.

Awards and Honors

Honorary Doctor of Science degrees, University of Chicago, Knox College, City University of New York, University of Rochester, Yale University

American Academy of Arts and Sciences, elected 1968

National Academy of Sciences, elected 1972

J. R. Oppenheimer Prize, 1973

Richtmeyer Lecturer of Am. Ass'n. of Physics Teachers, 1974

Scott Lecturer, Cavendish Laboratory, 1975

Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, 1977

Silliman Lecturer, Yale University, 1977

Am. Inst. of Physics-U.S. Steel Foundation Science Writing Award, 1977, for authorship of The First Three Minutes (1977)

Lauritsen Lecturer, Cal. Tech., 1979

Bethe Lecturer, Cornell Univ., 1979

Elliott Cresson Medal (Franklin Institute), 1979

Nobel Prize in Physics, 1979

Awards and Honors since 1979

Honorary Doctoral degrees, Clark University, City University of New York, Dartmouth College, Weizmann Institute, Clark University, Washington College, Columbia University

Elected to American Philosophical Society, Royal Society of London (Foreign Honorary Member), Philosophical Society of Texas

Henry Lecturer, Princeton University, 1981

Cherwell-Simon Lecturer, University of Oxford, 1983

Bampton Lecturer, Columbia University, 1983

Einstein Lecturer, Israel Academy of Arts & Sciences, 1984

McDermott Lecturer, University of Dallas, 1985

Hilldale Lecturer, University of Wisconsin, 1985

Clark Lecturer, University of Texas at Dallas, 1986

Brickweede Lecturer, Johns Hopkins University, 1986

Dirac Lecturer, University of Cambridge, 1986

Klein Lecturer, University of Stockholm, 1989

James Madison Medal of Princeton University, 1991