Word: likes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...