An Invitation To Stockholm

IF YOU WEATHER the crooked linoleum corridors of the second floor of the Jefferson Physics Laboratory, you come upon an unassuming, airy, office, distinguishable from all others only by its lazily opened door. Above the nameplate--"Prof. S. Glashow"--somebody's placed a gun control sticker, and above that a cockeyed "congratulations"--modest. as if in celebration of a birthday.

Its tenant, Shelly Glashow, is one of the three recipients of the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics. Had you glanced to your right some ten yards back, you would have been looking into the anteroom of the office of one of the others, Professor Steven Weinberg. His office is much like what you'd expect from a university big wig--carpeting, bound journals and paneling lend it an aura of the esoteric altogether absent in his neighbor's.

Their present adjacency, like their parallel career paths, is the stuff of Hollywood. Some 30 years ago the same two bartered theories on the subways of New York. Twenty years ago, they crammed physics in the libraries of Cornell. Although on graduation one went West and one went East, they retained common academic interests, publishing papers from California and Copenhagen on the same topics. They reunited in 1973, when Weinberg left MIT to join Glashow, and the rest of Harvard's celebrated physics Department on the second floor of Jefferson.

Background notwithstanding, it would be hard to find two birds less of a feather. If Weinberg is intensely serious, businesslike, and unassuming, Glashow is whimsical and voluable, sharing his physics and sense of humor with whomever will partake of it. On a given morning, you can glimpse him through his open door, feet up, talking shop with an attentive colleague, while smoking an carly-morning cigar that would make Red Auerbach choke. He's got an incongruous poster of fish species on one wall of his office, and Einstein up on another; a pair of cross country skis stand in a corner. Behind him rests a picture of the first observed "charmed quark"--a species he originally identified--at which he smiles affectionately. This is the odd couple that has made brilliant, complementary contributions to what Glashow calls the "glorious tapestry of modern physics," contributions of such moment as to win the elusive plaudits of the Stockholm conclave.

To begin to understand these contributions, you have to hark back as far as the beginning of the twentieth century, to the year Albert Einstein published his theory of general relativity. This momentous theory ggested briefly two important things: first, that matter in space, and space itself, are intimately connected; and second, that time should constitute an integral, fourth dimension, unlike in Newtonian physics where it is an independent parameter. Einstein proposed that the future of physics lay in the reduction of all of its laws to these geometrical, "space-time," propositions.

This in itself constituted a revolution in physics. From here, though, Einstein turned to the ambitious task of developing a "unified field theory." This theory strives, in short, to demonstrate that behind the four observable forces in nature--electromagnetism, gravity, the "weak" and "strong" forces--there lies a single force.

Of these four forces, Einstein concerned himself with only two--electromagnetism and gravity--because the others were simply beyond his experimental means. The two others, which exist on the sub-atomic level, were developed to resolve specific problems. Ernest Rutherford's celebrated early twentieth century experiments on nuclear density uncovered an empirical contradiction: all the protons (positively charged species) in a given atom are concentrated in its nucleus; since like charges repel one another, the nucleus should theoretically burst apart. So physicists coined the "strong" forces--those which specifically.

The "weak" forces were labeled to resolve a separate contradiction--the curious, so-called "beta-decay" of certain nuclei. Thus, if Einstein's unified field theory was to be vindicated, all these forces had somehow to be reconciled--proven to be aspects of the same force.

The unification of two of the forces is, ultimately, where Glashow, Weinberg, and their fellow recipient, Pakistani Dr. Abdus Salam, fit in. But not right away. Before their breakthrough came a legion of wayward plaths, of errors and frustrations. "Nobel Laureate Julian Schwinger," Glashow will say of his great mentor, "attacked the problem, but even he came away discouraged. There were too many mysteries." This was as recently as 1955, and at this time only a lonely few really believed that someone would prove this abstract theory.

But the unification of the weak and the electromagnetic forces remained the most promising avenue. "There were two major problems," Glashow recollects, "the mathematical problem, and the 'finiteness' problem. I solved the first, and Steve solved the second." The one clue sprung from the fact that the amount, or quantum of energy, exchanged in the weak interactions, the so-called "intermediate vector boson," was found to have the same value as the quantum of energy exchanged in electromagnetic interaction. The scales were obviously vastly different, as were the distances over which the two forces act, but this mathematical parallel nonetheless represented a gummer of hope. Glashow broke through in 1961 with a radical conception a neutral vector boson. This immediately resolved many of the most nagging paradoxes, and ultimately proved to be the cornerstone on which the Weinberg-Salam theory was based.

The curious aspect of this great discovery was that like so many other physical theories of its time, it was to lie fallow for many years. Students were forever proposing theories in a frenetic attempt to account for the many contradictions in physics; Glashow's was regarded as just another prospect. "I was very proud of the paper," its author fondly recalls, "but I had no idea of its import. If we'd been smarter, we'd have realized as early as 1964 how important it was. But we were stupid. I had to import two foreigners to figure it out for me."

Steven Weinberg's contribution came six years later, in 1967, when he and Salam simultaneously but separately published a system of equations known today as "guage theory." Guage theory serves as a sort of mathematical telescope, changing one frame of reference completely so as to allow it to be compared to another. In this particular instance, the two frames of reference were the electromagnetic forces, which act on large, easily-observed objects, and the weak forces, which act on sub-atomic particles. Guage theory reveled striking symmetries" that otherwise would not have been observable.

This theory also allowed physicists to make stunning predictions of the relativity poorly understood weak forces, almost all of which have since been vindicated. Perhaps the most important of these predictions is that of the existence of "neutral currents," first observed as recently as 1974. These currents have an analogue on the electromagnetic level.

Although the Nobel Prize Committee specifically cited these contributions, the public has latched on to Glashow's more recent hypothesis--that of the "charmed quarks." A testimony to what the imaginative selection of scientific names can do ("quark" originally comes from Joyce's "Finnegan s Wake"), charmed quarks are the next thread in this complex tapestry of theories. But while ingenious, the discovery of charm has no bearing on the awarding of the Nobel Prize. "No," Glashow bellows if you imply otherwise, "the citation from Sweden expressly doesn't mention charm. This is something else altogether."

Glashow's candor is characteristic of the genial working environment of the Harvard cooperative. Unlike other departments, neigh-neighboring professors often work on identical problems, and one's breakthough could well pave the way to a breakthrough by another. One graduate student says he has learned as much if not more from his fellow students than from his professors.

Harvard is acknowledged to have the strongest particle physics department in the country, and Glashow and Weinberg are its two greatest luminaries. But even so, their selection is something of an anomaly. In the first place, the Swedish Academy generally doesn't award the prize to a theoretical physicist until after his theory is completely proven. Embarassing situations might otherwise arise. While all evidence points clearly toward its being correct, thorough proof remains elusive. So, as Glashow terms it, the award is "a leap of faith." Also, the prize traditionally is not awarded to a scientist right away. As colleague Paul Bamberg says, "it's like electing old timers to the Hall of Fame."

Many think this is precisely the way the prize ought to remain. Arthur Jaffe, professor of Mathematical Physics, is one of them. Jaffe, who won the Heinemann Prize for mathematical physics this past week, contends that there's a good reason for the traditional lag: "the awarding of the Nobel Prize at too young an age can conceivably hamper a person's career. It focuses the attention, the publicity, in such a special way. You're so much in the spotlight, and your science suffers correspondingly." But Glashow, while feeling the immediate pressures of the prize and the extent to which they impinge on his study, does not agree. "It is only a short-term interruption, just look at all the other cases in which it was awarded young."

If it is an anomaly though, it is an anomaly that many had expected. Many physics graduate students believe the department has been waiting for years for the two to get the award. Glashow himself cagily suggest that he had more than an inkling of its imminent arrival. The first overt hint came last year during a trip he took to a conference abroad. He tells the story with delight: "I was cornered by one of those gray-haired Swedish physicists. I was armed with information about charm, all the information he could have wanted. It was my baby and I wanted to talk about it. But he didn't. He started to grill me about my work of some 15 years ago. He'd ask a question and I'd propose a tentaive answer, though I was a bit rusty. Whenever I was a bit off he'd quickly correct me. It soon became clear that he knew much more about my own work than I did."

Jaffe also wasn't surprised by the committee's decison. "In physics," he suggests, "there's clearly a small group which everybody in the field recognizes as head and shoulders above the rest. Maybe 20 persons. They are all deserving of the prize, but it can only go to say 20 per cent of them. Here's where publicity, both within the science community and outside of it fit in. Within the group the selection is fairly arbitrary."

Both Glashow and Weinberg have a manifest interest in popularizing their fields. A few years ago, Weinberg published "The First Three Minutes" a work which reconstructs in layman's terms the events that followed the Big Bang. It was an enormous success, both here and abroad, and has been translated into many languages. In fact, the book has sold much better in Germany than in the U.S. Glashow, who plans one day to write a book along the lines of his undergraduate course, finds this disturbing: "a better scientifically informed public would be far more capable of dealing with the scientific questions which now confront us--like nuclear energy." He has immense sympathy for the efforts of popularization made by those like his ex-brother-in-law ("It's all very incestuous, you know") Carl Sagan.

But at the same time he admits the tremendous insularity of theoretical physics. In fact, this is one of its charms. "I like physics better," he says, "for its lack of practical applications." But with a smile, he quickly qualifies this: "of course physicists could do plenty of other things if they wanted to you know--but I never was one for building mousetraps."

As one attempt to bring their lofty ideas to a comprehensible level, both Glashow and Weinberg have decided to offer Core Curriculum courses. A walk into one of Jefferson's airy lecture halls at 10 a.m. on a Friday morning reveals a tall man with tousled hair, chalk in hand, expostulating on one of the many topics "From Alchemy to Elementary Particle Physics." Glashow is a highly engaging lecturer, disorganized perhaps, but gifted with the vibrant tone that communicates his irrepressible enthusiasm for the subject. For his part, Weinberg will be offering a course in "Elementary Particle Physics." One of his colleagues says, "when Steven announced that if the Core resolution passed he would teach a course, I decided that I would vote for it."

IN THE EXAMINATION of its immediate points, the larger import of Glashow's and Weinberg's work can be easily overlooked. Unified field theory was unsubstantiated as recently as the 1950's. Belief that it would ultimately be proven true was the exception: skepticism was the rule. The "glorious tapestry" that we now appreciate was periously close to never being woven. So not only was guage theory momentous, but it was propitious, for with its discovery, the pendulum of scientific opinion swung in the other direction. As Bamberg suggests, "there's now abundant optimism where once there was none."

But what of the accusation made by many that it is hard to believe that a theory so complex, so elusive, could conceivably reflect the simplicity of nature? For this Glashow harbors no tolerance. "It's not complicated at all once you've been working with it for a while. Its beauty is its incredible simplicity." He drops his feet back on the floor, stokes his cigar, and begins to rock, Albert Einstein staring down over one shoulder, his charmed quark hovering over the other.