Glashow, Sheldon Lee (1932– )

US particle physicist. In 1964 he proposed the existence of a fourth, ‘charmed’ quark. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979 for his work which suggested ways in which the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force (two of the fundamental forces of nature) could be unified as a single force now called the electroweak force. He shared the award with Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg.

Glashow was born in New York and studied at Cornell and Harvard universities. He worked at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen before becoming professor at Harvard in 1967, and in 2000 at Boston University, Massachusetts.