IF YOU WEATHER the crooked linoleum corridors of the second floor of the Jefferson Physics Laboratory, you come upon an unassuming, airy, office, distinguishable from all others only by its lazily opened door. Above the nameplate--"Prof. S. Glashow"--somebody's placed a gun control sticker, and above that a cockeyed "congratulations"--modest. as if in celebration of a birthday.

Its 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's.

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.

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 in a corner. Behind him rests a picture of the first observed "charmed quark"--a species he originally identified--at which he smiles affectionately. This is the odd couple that has made brilliant, complementary contributions to what Glashow calls the "glorious tapestry of modern physics," contributions of such moment as to win the elusive plaudits of the Stockholm conclave.

To 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.

This in itself constituted a revolution in physics. From here, though, Einstein turned to the ambitious task of developing a "unified field theory." This theory strives, in short, to demonstrate that behind the four observable forces in nature--electromagnetism, gravity, the "weak" and "strong" forces--there lies a single force.

Of 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.

The "weak" forces were labeled to resolve a separate contradiction--the curious, so-called "beta-decay" of certain nuclei. Thus, if Einstein's unified field theory was to be vindicated, all these forces had somehow to be reconciled--proven to be aspects of the same force.

The 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.

But the 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 a gummer of hope. Glashow broke through in 1961 with a radical conception a neutral vector boson. This immediately resolved many of the most nagging paradoxes, and ultimately proved to be the cornerstone on which the Weinberg-Salam theory was based.

The 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 it out for me."

Steven Weinberg's contribution came six years later, in 1967, when he and Salam simultaneously but separately published a system of equations known today as "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.

Although the Nobel Prize Committee specifically cited these contributions, the public has latched on to Glashow's more recent hypothesis--that of the "charmed quarks." A testimony to what the imaginative selection of scientific names can do ("quark" originally comes from Joyce's "Finnegan s Wake"), charmed quarks are the next thread in this complex tapestry of theories. But while ingenious, the discovery of charm has no bearing on the awarding of the Nobel Prize. "No," Glashow bellows if you imply otherwise, "the citation from Sweden expressly doesn't mention charm. This is something else altogether."

Glashow's candor is characteristic of the genial working environment of the Harvard cooperative. Unlike other departments, neigh-neighboring professors often work on identical problems, and one's breakthough could well pave the way to a breakthrough by another. One graduate student says he has learned as much if not more from his fellow students than from his professors.