Sheldon Glashow: The Power of Useless Ideas! (#099)

Sheldon Glashow is a theoretical physicist and emeritus professor
at Harvard, where he also earned his Ph.D. He was the first to
propose a grand unified theory and also worked as a visiting
scientist at CERN. Glashow shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics
with Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg. He is a member of the Board
of Sponsors for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It was an honor
to have Sheldon Glashow on the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE podcast. He
joins our Nobel Minds playlist, having won the 1979 Nobel Prize in
Physics, for his “contributions to the theory of the unified weak
and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles,
including, inter alia, the prediction of the weak neutral current.”
Shelly recounts a remarkable life as the son of a plumber who went
to the acclaimed Bronx Science high school and then worked his way
through some of the most notable laboratories in the world, meeting
colleagues and forming collaborations along the way. Having won
science’s top prize over 40 years ago didn’t slow him down, as he
only recently retired from research and teaching. Shelly’s 1988
book, “Interactions: A Journey Through the Mind of a Particle
Physicist and the Matter of this World,” holds up decades later as
one that asks important questions about physics and guides future
generations of scientists. I recommend that everyone curious about
the field read it. His writing style is enviously humorous and
accessible. I was interested to hear about how his love of science
fiction encouraged his career as a physicist. Considering many of
the topics we cover would have been considered science fiction even
in the time that Shelly has been alive, he is properly impressed
and optimistic about the benefits technology can have on scientific
discovery. It was also encouraging to see how interested and
engaged he still is in the pursuit of knowledge. Though he does
express some pessimism about the future of humanity. Perhaps it’s
hard not to during the pandemic, combined with the grim news about
climate change and other threats. Hopefully, the fields he and I
know and love – “useless fields” as he calls them – can continue
that Nobel legacy of bettering humankind. You will enjoy this Full
course: Quantum Field Theory by Sidney Coleman (1975) [Havard
Physics 253
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhsb6tmzSpiwrZuDMyweABm7FShZu3YUv
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