Word: weinbergs
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Physicist Alvin Weinberg, one of the developers of commercial nuclear power, believes that the U.S. should establish a ''nuclear priesthood'' of superbly trained reactor technicians and free them from the supervision of power-company executives. These technicians could shut down a reactor any time the gauges misbehave, without thinking about costs. Weinberg also suggests that the nation investigate whether some types of reactors-the graphite-moderated, gas-cooled kind used in Britain, or Canada's ''Candu,'' cooled by liquid sodium-might be safer than the pressurized-water reactors built...
...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...
...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...
...more important than grueling research that might benefit mankind later, a decision no doubt reinforced by the fact that the social sciences are frequently not so intellectually taxing as scientific research. A similar attitude has led to attacks on such training grounds for young scientists as Glashow and Weinberg's alma mater, the Bronx High School of Science, which has been called "elitist" for insisting on tough admissions standards...