Harvard physicist, 80, earns Nobel
Four decades after his research launched a whole new branch of physics, Harvard University professor Roy J. Glauber was named a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize yesterday for insights into the strange behavior of light that laid the groundwork for high precision instruments from lasers to global positioning systems.
Sharing the $1.3 million physics award with Glauber are two experimental physicists -- John L. Hall of the United States and Theodor W. Hänsch of Germany -- whose work built on Glauber's predictions of how tiny amounts of light behave. Hall and Hänsch devised an ingenious way to measure light that will probably lead to the most accurate clocks ever devised, improved global positioning systems, and other new technologies.
Glauber's observations about the behavior of light expanded on work done by Albert Einstein, whose portrait hangs in his office in the Lyman building on the Harvard campus. Though light appears to come in waves, Einstein demonstrated that it is made up of discrete packets, or quanta, known as photons. Glauber developed a set of equations that accurately predict how these photons behave. These equations form the theoretical basis of large bodies of other work, such as research aimed at creating quantum computers, which could be much more powerful than even today's supercomputers.
''I was surprised that this had not already been recognized" with a Nobel prize, said Kevin Bedell, chair of the physics department at Boston College. ''I guess sometimes good things get missed."
Glauber, 80, said the award, given for work he published in 1963, took him by surprise. Speaking yesterday morning before a bank of clicking cameras in a large room in Harvard's Jefferson Building, Glauber said his day had begun in the ''inky blackness" before dawn -- or more precisely, ''at 5:36 a.m." -- when the phone woke him in his Arlington home. He answered, he said, and heard a man with a Swedish accent. The man told him he had been awarded a Nobel, considered the greatest prize in academia, but Glauber said he suspected it might be a joke.
''I could scarcely believe him," said Glauber. His doubt quickly evaporated though, as the phone began to ring with the calls of well-wishers. Eventually, he said, he had to take the phone off the hook so he could get out of his pajamas.
Glauber's infatuation with science began well before college, he recalled yesterday. Growing up in New York City, he was so fascinated by astronomy that he ground lenses for a telescope by hand, a time consuming, painstaking process. By the time he started college at Harvard, he had grown to love mathematics and physics. While still an undergraduate, he said at the press conference, he was drafted to work on the Manhattan project, and helped perform the complex calculations that went into the creation of the first nuclear weapons.
After the war, Glauber worked at a number of academic positions but returned to Harvard in 1952, and has been there ever since. Before Glauber published his theory, physicists had largely ignored the problem of how to apply quantum mechanics -- which describes how the physical world works at tiny scales -- to the study of light.
But the invention of the laser in the 1950s exposed gaps in the theories of light used at the time. Light did not appear to behave as randomly as classical theories predicted. Glauber's theory closed these gaps, uncovering the statistics that underlie light's behavior and also opening up new areas of inquiry, such as suggesting new ways that laser light could be used.
The other two winners -- Hall, a scientist at the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., and Hänsch, a professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Germany -- made their breakthrough in the 1990s using something called the ''frequency comb technique." Their technique made it possible to measure the frequency of a laser light with extreme accuracy, allowing them to do other measurements more accurately. Physicists have devised all kinds of ways of using laser light to measure time and distance, but even better methods for measuring laser light can improve those measurements.
Better measuring technology, in turn, will allow the creation of more accurate atomic clocks and better global positioning systems that can pinpoint geographic locations. Better measuring technology also makes it possible to pick out more subtle physical phenomenon that have so far escaped detection, said Marlan Scully, a professor at Texas A&M University. The technology can be used to determine whether physical constants, such as the speed of light, are truly fixed, or change ever so slightly over time. Or it could be used to improve devices being used to search for gravitational waves, ripples in space that are predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity but have never been observed.
''By making more precise measurements we are able to confront ever more subtle questions," Scully said.
The prize is the second Nobel to be announced this week. On Monday, Drs. Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren, both Australians, were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for proving that bacteria and not stress was the main cause of painful ulcers of the stomach and intestine.
The awards for chemistry, peace, and literature will be announced through the end of the week, with the economics prize to be awarded Oct. 10. The prizes will be awarded by Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf at a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
Although Glauber was given the Nobel for work completed long ago, he continues to have an active career. His dining room table is covered with physics papers. He does work on nuclear physics. And he is also a passionate teacher. On a day that may well represent the pinnacle of his career, with colleagues and media from around the world trying to reach him, he showed up to teach a physics class for freshman, ''The Atomic Nucleus on the World Stage."
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report. Gareth Cook can be reached at cook@globe.com. 
