Glashow recalls reading a good deal of science on his own, but does not describe himself as a prodigy. "I frankly don't remember knowing very much, although my teachers were impressed with how much I knew."
His first serious scientific interest was chemistry. "There was my period of explosives," he says, somewhat wistfully. "in those days you could get any chemicals you wanted. I would mix them together in various random ways. At one time I had a basement full of liquid bromine."
Glashow synthesized nitrogen tetra-iodide, an extremely unstable compound which explodes when anything is dropped on it, and took to soaking dollar bills in nitric acid. This turns the dollar bill into flashpaper, which burns very rapidly and leaves no ash. Glashow gave this up when it became too expensive.
Eventually, Glashow dropped chemistry altogether. "Chemistry is good for fun--it's like baseball," Glashow said. "It has its role for small children, but I can't see an adult being concerned with it."
Glashow ultimately went to Cornell, where he received a B.A. in physics. "I was mostly interested in avoiding difficult problem sets," Glashow said of Cornell. In 1954 he came to Harvard, where he studied physics under Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger.
"From 1958 to 1966 I was in exile," Glashow said. "I just wandered around teaching, waiting for an offer from Harvard." Since 1966, Glashow has worked on particle physics at Harvard.
Glashow fears that the startling successes of contemporary physicists may eventually render physics a "complete" science in the same way that he considers chemistry a complete science, lacking any "interesting" questions. He laments the lack of great contradictions such as those evident in early 20th century physics. From such contradictions the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics grew. In the absence of such contradictions, physics proceeds too smoothly, Glashow reasons, and becomes less interesting.
Glashow draws an analogy with biology, saying that once people agree biology is chemistry it is completely known. "The fact that it's known doesn't make it trivial, but we're interested in the rules of the game, not the play," he says.
What important physical questions remain unanswered? Glashow points to "quark confinement"--the fact that quarks, although an amazingly successful theoretical construct, have never been seen. A good explanation of their reclusive nature is desireable.
Glashow does not think about the social implications of his work, of which he believes there are none. In a 1974 lecture entitled "Something exciting Is Happening in Particle Physics" Glashow asked, "What are the implications of the charmed quark for--anything?"
"The problem we're faced with is we're given a world, which we're not terribly responsible for ourselves, and we're trying to understand it. We hit these particles against each other, or, in the beginning [of particle physics], we just looked at the cosmic rays as they came at us. The particles hit particles and strange particles come out. These particles are totally unnecessary--you can't make toothpaste out of them.
"But they're there! And you want to understand, whatever 'why' means, why they're there... Charmed particles don't help anything at the practical level, except our understanding of how this whole thing is put together.
"I could make very attractive theories with just u quarks, d quarks, electrons and neutrinos. We don't need strangeness, we don't need charm and we don't need muons. They seem to come together as a package of mysterious unexplained things, none of which have anything to do with toothpaste. But they're all there.
"I wish they weren't, too, because I could make theories without them. But they're there, some of them, at least. And we have to try to explain them."