Sheldon Lee Glashow Theory Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.