Sheldon Lee Glashow Quotes

My father said I should become a doctor and do science in my spare time, which in retrospect might not have been a bad idea, but I wasn't interested in taking care of people's ills.

One of the principal achievements of physics in the 20th century has been the revelation that the atom is not indivisible or elementary at all but has a complex structure.

We called the new [fourth] quark the "charmed quark" because we were pleased, and fascinated by the symmetry it brought to the subnuclear world. "Charm" also means a "a magical device to avert evil," and in 1970 it was realized that the old three quark theory ran into very serious problems ... As if by magic the existence of the charmed quark would [solve those problems].

What the string theorists do is arguably physics. It deals with the physical world. They're attempting to make a consistent theory that explains the interactions we see among particles and gravity as well. That's certainly physics, but it's a kind of physics that is not yet testable.

Chemistry is good for fun - it's like baseball. It has its role for small children, but I can't see an adult being concerned with it.

In 1956, when I began doing theoretical physics, the study of elementary particles was like a patchwork quilt. Electrodynamics, weak interactions, and strong interactions were clearly separate disciplines, separately taught and separately studied. There was no coherent theory that described them all.

Would physics at Geneva be as good as physics at Harvard? I think not. Rome? I think not. In Britain, I don't think there is one place, neither Cambridge nor Oxford, which can compare with Harvard.

I think that we scientists are seeking an understanding of the natural world. We come in various types - chemists and physicists and biologists and such - and we all have the same goal. We are making progress.

There's something called From 'Alchemy to Quarks,' which will teach you everything you have to know, you want to know, about physics.

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.

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.

String theory has had a long and wonderful history. It originated as a technique to try to understand the strong force. It was a calculational mechanism, a way of approaching a mathematical problem that was too difficult, and it was a promising way, but it was only a technique. It was a mathematical technique rather than a theory in itself.