Herbert Brown was born in London, in 1912 and since early childhood had to provide for his poor family. That did not stop him from succesfully completing his education.

In 1979 Herbert Brown received the Nobel prize in chemistry “for developing the use of boron in organic synthesis.”

Brown’s methods are used worldwide as basic procedures in laboratory work.

Sheldon Glashow was born in New York in 1932. He studied physics at Cornell University and at Harvard University, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1959. Subsequently, Glashow was appointed Head of the Harvard University Physics Department.

In 1979, Glashow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Weinberg and Abdus-Salam “for their contribution to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles including, inter alia, the prediction of the weak neutral current”.

Glashow had many achievements in the field of elementary particles, but the Nobel Prize was awarded to him for what was considered his most outstanding contribution: the unification of the weak interaction and the electromagnetic interaction. Until this discovery, physics described the universe by means of four forces: gravitation, electromagnetic interactions, strong interactions and weak interactions. Glashow showed that the weak and the electromagnetic interactions are different aspects of the same whole.

It can thus be said that Glashow brought physics a step closer to its ultimate goal – a Unified theory of all forces acting in nature.

Steven Weinberg was born in 1933 in New-York.

In 1979, he received the Nobel prize in physics, together with Sheldon Glashow and Abdus-Salam, “For their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including inter-alia the prediction of the weak neutral current.”

The three scientists reduced the number of interactions by which physics describes the universe from four to three and in so doing advanced science toward its ultimate goal: the creation of a unified theory of all forces acting in the cosmos.