Word: weak
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Historically, Chrysler has played weak sister to General Motors and Ford, suffering from a combination of financial mismanagement and lack of foresight. Chrysler still has not quite admitted that the Age of the Big Car has ended. This fall, Lee lacocca, chairman of Chrysler, insisted that the auto industry's biggest profits were to be found not in small, but in intermediate-sized luxury cars, loaded with special options...
...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...
...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...
...campaigned dorm-to-dorm this year in his second bid for a council seat, points to the increased number of Harvard registrants as reason to believe students might finally help choose city leaders. If all of the 1500 Harvard students registered to vote turn out (unlikely is too weak a word for this prospect), they would be able to singlehandedly elect one candidate, a fact that scares as many Cambridge politicians as it entices...