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