November 12, 1985

The police said yesterday that they still had no clues to the identity or motivations of the vandals who broke the display windows of 13 shops in a predominantly Hasidic section of Brooklyn last weekend. The windows, which were broken on the Jewish sabbath, were being replaced yesterday, and business appeared normal at the shops - between 45th and 53d Streets on 13th Avenue, the Borough Park section's main commercial street. As merchants cleaned broken glass from sidewalks and shops, many said they were troubled by what happened on 13th Avenue, whose one- and two-story buildings house many restaurants, jewelry stores, electronic shops and bakeries, most of which are owned by Jews.

The Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service said today that he expected disciplinary action to be taken against two Border Patrol agents who forcibly returned a Soviet seaman to his ship last month. ''There obviously were mistakes made,'' the Commissioner, Alan C. Nelson, said in an interview. , He said the agents erred in ''not following the guidelines'' after the sailor, Miroslav Medved, who is a Ukrainian, jumped from a freighter into the Mississippi River near New Orleans. Mr. Nelson said the agency had submitted a report to the Justice Department detailing the mistakes made by the two agents, who have not been publicly identified. The report, which runs to more than 100 pages, says that the agents acted hastily and violated agency regulations by returning Mr. Medved to the Soviet freighter without consulting their supervisors, according to Reagan Administration officials.

THE Great Red Spot of Jupiter is yielding its mystery to a new approach by physicists and meteorologists. Gone now are the volcano theory, the egg theory, the planetoid theory, the column-of-gas theory and the hurricane theory. Scientists have concluded that the Red Spot is a gigantic eddy of swirling gas, driven by the planet's turbulent winds and apparently capable of keeping its shape as long as the planet keeps spinning. The Red Spot, a cosmic landmark since the first telescopes revealed it 300 years ago, has baffled generations of scientists by standing mostly in place and by refusing to disappear. Specialists in the study of dynamical systems, or ''chaos,'' now believe that their findings will help them understand how order can emerge spontaneously from natural chaos, an understanding that may help penetrate the complex patterns of weather on earth.

International Soviet negotiators continue to insist on a ban on scientific research into space-based defense weapons, even though Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, seemed to hint publicly two months ago that such research might be allowed, according to a senior Reagan Administration official. [Page A1, Column 6.] Moscow's press nearly ignored the war in Afghanistan in its first years, but Soviet newspapers now regularly carry reports about young Soviet heroes killed in battle, and Soviet television is now showing combat scenes. After almost six years of combat involving hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers and thousands of Soviet casualties, the Kremlin cannot pretend that only a few Russian soldiers are in Afghanistan temporarily to help out. [A1:5-6.]

A report in the Art People column in Weekend on Friday about a suit involving a 1981 auction of Impressionist paintings at Christie's misidentified a lawyer, Robert Weiner. He represents Cristallina S.A., the company that consigned the paintings to Christie's.