In 1979, Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Wein- berg were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics “for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and elec- tromagnetic interaction between elementary particles....” Born in Manhattan in 1932 to Russian immigrant parents, he is now a professor emeritus of physics at Harvard University and professor emeritus of mathematics and physics at Boston University. Like a nexus, he’s seemingly connected in one way or another to almost all of the amaz- ing physicists of the twentieth century, and as such has both created nucleation sites for ideas to flourish and also catalyzed other interactions whose effects are still being felt today.

He is the classic figure of an American physicist and is allegedly the inspiration for the television character Shel- don Cooper on The Big Bang Theory. To be sure, Glashow is a bookish intellectual with a mischievous sense of humor. I admire that he is intellectually honest and rigorous but also playful and avuncular. He’s cherished not least for his ability to describe the mysterious aspects of nature in a playful, delightful way. And all of his writings about science—including the wonderful book Interactions, published in 1988, which provided a pathway for the future of physics as he perceived it at the time—make room for the role of serendipity and luck in those discoveries that could never have been forecasted, no matter how many prizes a scientist might have won. He still has a sense of wonder in his late eighties. 

Available on Amazon: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner 

About Professor Brian Keating:

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