Two Harvard Scientists Win Joint Nobel Prize in Physics

Two Harvard professors and a Pakistani yesterday received the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics for their work on the theoretical unity of interactions between elementary subatomic particles.

The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences awarded the $190,000 prize jointly to Sheldon L. Glashow, professor of Physics; Steven Weinberg, Higgins Professor of Physics; and Abdus Salam, director of the Italian-based International Center for Theoretical Physics and professor of physics at the London Imperial College of Sciences and Technology.

"I was completely surprised," Glashow said yesterday, and added. "One always hopes; but I didn't have any solid idea. That's the mystery of the Swedish Academy."

Glashow called the award "a testament to the fact that man can find a simplicity and beauty behind the seeming complexity of the world."

Hair-raising

Weinberg said yesterday he first heard of his award when he was shaving with the radio on. "My hair stood on end when I heard the first report that 'one' American scientist had won," he said.

"My father called me up 30 seconds later," Weinberg said, adding "I felt I was taking my father an 'A' report card," he said.

At a champagne celebration in the Lyman Laboratory library yesterday, Dean Rosovsky said the "two stalwart teachers in the Core" had "added greatly to the glory of the University."

Weinberg wrote his pioneering paper in 1967 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Karl Strauch, chairman of the Physics department, said yesterday. Glashow said the award citation appeared to refer to his work in 1960 at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.

Glashow said the three Nobel laureates worked on the underlying connection between electromagnetism and the "weak" nuclear force (which causes radioactivity), as a step towards Einstein's ideal of a fully unified field theory that would include gravity and the "strong" nuclear force (which binds protons to neutrons).

Experimenters have submitted funding proposals within the last six months for tests of the theory's predictions about the "strong" force, Glashow said.

Strauch said experimental physicists often receive recognition more quickly than theoretical physicists.

The prizewinners predicted the existence of the underlying "neutral current" and the "charm quark" particle more than six years before their existence was proven experimentally, Strauch said. He added that the experimenters who detected the "charm quark" in 1973 were awarded Nobel Prizes after two years while the theoreticians had to wait until yesterday.