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. Sheldon Lee Glashow Read Quote
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. Sheldon Lee Glashow Read Quote
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. Sheldon Lee Glashow Read Quote
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. Sheldon Lee Glashow Read Quote
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. Sheldon Lee Glashow Read Quote
I had more or less abandoned the idea of an electroweak gauge theory during the period 1961-1970. Of the several reasons for this, one was the failure of my naive foray into renormalizability. Sheldon Lee Glashow Read Quote
The standard theory may survive as a part of the ultimate theory, or it may turn out to be fundamentally wrong. In either case, it will have been an important way-station, and the next theory will have to be better. Sheldon Lee Glashow Read Quote
String theory’s biggest prediction is that gravity exists. That’s good. That’s a lot more than preceding theories could do. Sheldon Lee Glashow Read Quote
