CENTERPIECE
HE'S A BIT OF A MECHANIC, PEERING INTO THE HEART OF THE UNIVERSE

Author: By Edward Dolnick Contributing Reporter

Date: Friday, December 10, 1982
Page: ?????
Section: RUN OF PAPER

Glashow, whose job is to think very hard about such momentous topics as the birth and death of the universe, refuses to discuss either his work or
himself in grandiose terms.

Glashow's fellow prizewinner, Steven Weinberg, ended a recent popular account of science with the words, "The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy."

Asked why he does physics, Glashow takes a less lofty tone. "It's fun, pure and simple."

"Sometimes understanding how things work is a delight. I'm sure that a skilled auto mechanic who figures out what's wrong with some old clunker has the same thrill of discovery that a scientist does."

"My father was a plumber, so I was exposed early to strange problems," he adds.

In the intervening years, the problems to which Glashow has devoted his energy have grown ever stranger. They point to the heart of questions involving the structure and duration of the physical universe.

Unlike some physicists who think that the hunt to uncover nature's secrets will never end - that nature, like an onion, will reveal layer under layer but no final core - Glashow not only thinks that the hunt will end but thinks that the end is in sight.

"I'm in a minority that thinks there may not be any more big surprises," he says. "I look back to the days when there was something radical to be discovered every year."

Glashow believes that there is only one consistent way that all the parts of the universe can fit together.

"The question is," he asks, "when someone set this (universe* up, how many dials did He have to twiddle? If there were an original Creator, did He have any choice about things like the mass of the electron or the number of quarks (elementary particles*?"

"The ideal physics answer," Glashow says, "would be, No, it had to be the way it is.' "

"We haven't proved it and we're nowhere near it. But the fundamental belief of physicists is that there's only an on-off switch - all He could do was decide whether or not to start things up."

Today Glashow and other physicists working on so-called "grand unified field" theories believe that they are catching on - literally as well as metaphorically - to how the universe was set up at its creation.

One of the major discoveries of astronomy in this century is that the
universe is expanding - everything is moving away from everything else, the way dots on the surface of a balloon move apart as it is inflated.

Physicists believe that today's expansion is a relic of an explosion 20 billion years ago, when the so-called Big Bang burst the universe into existence.

That explosion and what happened in the first fractions of a second right after it are beyond our imagining. Yet the grand unified theories deal explicitly and mathematically with a time so soon after the Big Bang that the entire universe would have been small enough to fit inside a teacup.

Under the conditions of inconceivable heat and inconceivable density that then reigned, all that existed was a madly boiling chaos of subatomic particles. In that cauldron, complex structures like atoms and molecules could not exist.

Instead, matter only gradually took on the variety of complicated structures it has today as the universe expanded and cooled.

And the grand unified theories propose that, not only has matter evolved, but the interactions that today govern that matter may themselves have evolved
from one or two forces that reigned in the infancy of the universe.

Physicists believe that four forces, or interactions, govern all matter. The four are gravity, electromagnetism, and what are called the strong nuclear interaction and the weak nuclear interaction.

Gravity and electromagnetism have been known, if not understood, for centuries. The strong interaction, which holds atomic nuclei together, and the weak interaction, which causes radioative decay in some atomic nuclei, were discovered only after scientists began to explore the atom.

Glashow won the Nobel Prize, along with physicists Weinberg and Abdus Salam, for showing that electromagnetism and the weak force are actually two faces of a single entity, now called the "electroweak" interaction.

The new grand unified theories that Glashow and other physicists around the world are working on attempt to unite the electroweak and the strong forces.

That would leave only gravity still to be integrated, though physicists - but not Glashow - are already hard at work on that project.

If the new theories are correct, Glashow explained, one of their consequences is that protons are not eternal but decay. And if protons decay, then the atoms they form a part of decay, as well; since everything in the world is made of atoms, everything will eventually be transformed from matter into pure energy.

Experiments to test that prediction are under way. Glashow expects that by February 1983, newspapers will proclaim, "Diamonds are not forever."

Despite its dramatic sound, the prediction that protons decay is hard to test, Glashow said, because the theory claims that the lifetime of a proton is billions and billions of times longer than the age of the universe so far.

To test the grand unification theories directly, Glashow explains, would require "a machine that consumes more power than the sun produces."

The theories can therefore only be tested by examining what the consequences today would be if the various interactions were indeed unified at the universe's birth.

In principle, it is like testing a theory about dinosaurs by predicting the sorts of fossils that researchers should find on earth today, millions of years after the creatures' extinction.

"At the rate the theory predicts that protons decay," Glashow says, "you'd expect one decay per ton (of matter* per 15 years."

That is a long time to wait, but Glashow pointed out a way around the problem. "The answer is that you get yourself a lot of protons," he wrote in a recent article. "For example, in 1000 tons of matter, we expect about 50 protons to decay each year. So you simply have to monitor everything that goes on inside 1000 tons of matter and distinguish proton and neutron decays from everything else."

Despite Glashow's wry tone, laboratories around the world are carrying out exactly the research program he described. In order to minimize the possibility that cosmic rays or other high-energy particles could interfere with the findings, the experiments are done deep underground, in a setting Glashow describes as a "big swimming pool inside of a mine lined with garbage bags."

In a salt mine near Lake Erie, for instance, researchers have filled an immense hole half a mile underground with some 3000 tons of water and left it in darkness. They have outfitted the area with thousands of devices that can detect the characteristic flash of light given off by decaying particles, and have connected those detectors to a computer.

Now the experimenters sit and wait for the computer to tell them the fate of the universe. They expect a definite answer, yea or nay, in a matter of weeks or months.

"You could ask, is this (eventual death of the universe* relevant?' " Glashow says, "and the answer is, of course not, except in a philosophical sense."

The decay of protons means, Glashow explains, that "the very matter of the
universe is transient. We're fortunate enough to live in this period when there is matter."

"It can be depressing," says Glashow, who seems not at all depressed.

"But it's an old story. We've known for years that the stars go out, for instance, just like we're running out of power."

Glashow, a 50-year-old who lives in Brookline with his wife and four children, shows no sign of running out of power. Lately he has been in the news not only for his scientific work but also because of attempts to lure him to Texas.

Texas A&M, a traditional power in football but not in science, has reportedly made an informal offer to Glashow comparable to the $1.6-million over seven years that it pays the football coach.

Glashow calls the wooing "flattering," but adds, "Most of the progress in understanding how the universe works is made by people under 40."

"Which is just as well," he adds, "or we'd end up like the Kremlin, run by people over 80."

Though modest personally, Glashow says that "the progress of science is unstoppable," except by opposition from such forces as anti-evolutionists.

Despite his statements about the importance of science and the magnitude of his own work in probing what he has called "the fundamental nature of the
universe," Glashow refuses to be drawn out by questions about whether the problems he works on are more elevated than the challenges most people face at work.

"Elevated, schmelevated. You just do what you're trained to do," he says.

He pauses a moment and concedes, "It's tremendously rewarding to be one of the first to understand something about the world. I've had that feeling on a couple of occasions."

Sheldon Glashow beams. "It's a good feeling."

DOLNIC;11/09,11:31 CORCOR;12/10,14 B07785584