Word: glashow
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...