Harvard is acknowledged to have the strongest particle physics department in the country, and Glashow and Weinberg are its two greatest luminaries. But even so, their selection is something of an anomaly. In the first place, the Swedish Academy generally doesn't award the prize to a theoretical physicist until after his theory is completely proven. 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."

Many think this is precisely the way the prize ought to remain. Arthur Jaffe, professor of Mathematical Physics, is one of them. Jaffe, who won the Heinemann Prize for mathematical physics this past week, contends that there's a good reason for the traditional lag: "the awarding of the Nobel Prize at too young an age can conceivably hamper a person's career. It focuses the attention, the publicity, in such a special way. You're so much in the spotlight, and your science suffers correspondingly." But Glashow, while feeling the immediate pressures of the prize and the extent to which they impinge on his study, does not agree. "It is only a short-term interruption, just look at all the other cases in which it was awarded young."

If it is an anomaly though, it is an anomaly that many had expected. Many physics graduate students believe the department has been waiting for years for the two to get the award. Glashow himself cagily suggest that he had more than an inkling of its imminent arrival. The first overt hint came last year during a trip he took to a conference abroad. He tells the story with delight: "I was cornered by one of those gray-haired Swedish physicists. I was armed with information about charm, all the information he could have wanted. It was my baby and I wanted to talk about it. But he didn't. He started to grill me about my work of some 15 years ago. He'd ask a question and I'd propose a tentaive answer, though I was a bit rusty. Whenever I was a bit off he'd quickly correct me. It soon became clear that he knew much more about my own work than I did."

Jaffe also wasn't surprised by the committee's decison. "In physics," he suggests, "there's clearly a small group which everybody in the field recognizes as head and shoulders above the rest. Maybe 20 persons. They are all deserving of the prize, but it can only go to say 20 per cent of them. Here's where publicity, both within the science community and outside of it fit in. Within the group the selection is fairly arbitrary."

Both Glashow and Weinberg have a manifest interest in popularizing their fields. A few years ago, Weinberg published "The First Three Minutes" a work which reconstructs in layman's terms the events that followed the Big Bang. It was an enormous success, both here and abroad, and has been translated into many languages. In fact, the book has 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.

But at the same time he admits the tremendous insularity of theoretical physics. In fact, this is one of its charms. "I like physics better," he says, "for its lack of practical applications." But with a smile, he quickly qualifies this: "of course physicists could do plenty of other things if they wanted to you know--but I never was one for building mousetraps."

As one attempt to bring their lofty ideas to a comprehensible level, both Glashow and Weinberg have decided to offer Core Curriculum courses. A walk into one of Jefferson's airy lecture halls at 10 a.m. on a Friday morning reveals a tall man with tousled hair, chalk in hand, expostulating on one of the many topics "From Alchemy to Elementary Particle Physics." Glashow is a highly engaging lecturer, disorganized perhaps, but gifted with the vibrant tone that communicates his irrepressible enthusiasm for the subject. For his part, Weinberg will be offering a course in "Elementary Particle Physics." One of his colleagues says, "when Steven announced that if the Core resolution passed he would teach a course, I decided that I would vote for it."

IN THE EXAMINATION of its immediate points, the larger import of Glashow's and Weinberg's work can be easily overlooked. Unified field theory was unsubstantiated as recently as the 1950's. Belief that it would ultimately be proven true was the exception: skepticism was the rule. The "glorious tapestry" that we now appreciate was periously close to never being woven. So not only was guage theory momentous, but it was propitious, for with its discovery, the pendulum of scientific opinion swung in the other direction. As Bamberg suggests, "there's now abundant optimism where once there was none."

But what of the accusation made by many that it is hard to believe that a theory so complex, so elusive, could conceivably reflect the simplicity of nature? For this Glashow harbors no tolerance. "It's not complicated at all once you've been working with it for a while. Its beauty is its incredible simplicity." He drops his feet back on the floor, stokes his cigar, and begins to rock, Albert Einstein staring down over one shoulder, his charmed quark hovering over the other.