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Mathematical symmetries within the standard model suggest the weak and electromagnetic forces are different aspects of a single “electroweak” force.

At extremely high energies, the electromagnetic force, which controls the behavior of charged particles such as electrons, and the weak force, which governs processes such as fission decays, are unified into one “electroweak” force.

When scientists access such “young cosmos” states with particle accelerators, they see electromagnetism and the weak force acting as one single force—the electroweak force—suggesting that in the early universe, these two forces were one.

His work in showing how electromagnetism and the weak force could be jointly viewed as the electroweak force was made known to the world in a paper published in 1967 in Physical Review Letters.

The physicist Sheldon Glashow, now of Boston University, had proposed a theory in 1961 that unified the weak force and electromagnetic forces, but it had the same problem of explaining why the carriers of the weak part of the “electroweak force” weren’t massless.