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Harvard physicist, 80, earns Nobel

By Gareth Cook, Globe Staff | October 5, 2005

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.

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Sign up for: Globe Headlines e-mail | Breaking News Alerts 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.

By BiharBrains, Section Biharbrains Community
Posted on Thu Oct 06, 2005 at 04:47:10 PM EST

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.

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