Murray Gell-Mann

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

by James Gleick  · 1 Jan 1992  · 795pp  · 215,529 words

of their publisher these became popular best-sellers. After his death in 1988 his sometime friend, collaborator, office neighbor, foil, competitor, and antagonist, the acerbic Murray Gell-Mann, angered his family at a memorial service by asserting, “He surrounded himself with a cloud of myth, and he spent a great deal of time

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himself was thriving as head of a fruitful group at Columbia. “Theoreticians were in disgrace”—so it seemed to one especially precocious student of physics, Murray Gell-Mann. “The theory of elementary particles has reached an impasse,” Victor Weisskopf wrote. Everyone had been struggling futilely, he said, especially since the war, and everyone

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at the lunch table; a group of his graduate students protected themselves with a conversational convention in which Schwinger meant Feynman and Feynman meant Schwinger.) Murray Gell-Mann later spent a semester staying in Schwinger’s house in Cambridge and loved to say afterward that he had searched everywhere for the Feynman diagrams

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important catchphrase. Experimenters looked for examples or counterexamples. In the longer term its main contribution to physics was that its popularity rankled a younger theorist, Murray Gell-Mann. He thought Pais was wrong, and he was jealous. Murray At fourteen he had been declared “Most Studious” and “wonder boy” by his classmates at

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, taught himself a few words of Samoan and then resignedly told a friend, “The only person who will know I’m pronouncing this wrong is Murray.” Gell-Mann attended Columbia Grammar on full scholarship. His father, born in Austria, had learned to speak a perfectly unaccented English and so, in the early 1920s

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beyond human understanding, and scientists may be the world’s happiest consumers of such stories. A modern example: A physicist studying quantum field theory with Murray Gell-Mann at the California Institute of Technology in the 1950s, before standard texts have become available, discovers unpublished lecture notes by Richard Feynman, circulating samizdat style

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did have some kind of handedness built into its guts, then an experimenter might be able to find events that did not conserve parity. When Murray Gell-Mann was a graduate student at MIT, a standard problem in one course was to derive the conservation of parity by mathematical logic, transforming coordinates from

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moments after the reception he ran out of gasoline on the Pasadena Freeway. He told Gweneth cheerfully: So this is how we’re starting life. Murray Gell-Mann, who had married an Englishwoman he met at the Institute for Advanced Study several years before, thought Feynman was playing catch-up—now he, too

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knowledge of the movements of sun, moon, and planets. Codes, mathematics, and astronomy—eventually he delivered a lecture at Caltech on deciphering Mayan hieroglyphics. Afterward, Murray Gell-Mann “countered,” Feynman said, with a series of six lectures on the languages of the world.) The Maya had a theory of astronomy that enabled them

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I’ve forgotten,” he said. Quarks and Partons In 1983, looking back on the evolution of particle physics since the now-historic Shelter Island conference, Murray Gell-Mann said, uncontroversially, that he and his colleagues had developed a theory that “works.” He summed it up in one intricately crafted sentence (rather more refined

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a small first printing early in 1985. It sold out quickly, and within weeks the publisher had a surprising best-seller. One unhappy reader was Murray Gell-Mann. His attention focused on Feynman’s description of the joy of discovering the “new law” of weak interactions in 1957: “It was the first time

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sue. For late editions of the paperback Feynman added a parenthetical disclaimer: “Of course it wasn’t true, but finding out later that at least Murray Gell-Mann—and also Sudarshan and Marshak—had worked out the same theory didn’t spoil my fun.” Surely You’re Joking gave offense in another way

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of these things is nonsense! You’re trying to make something difficult and complicated out of something that’s simple and beautiful.” Across the hall Murray Gell-Mann looked out of his office. “I see you’ve met Dick,” he said. Feynman had always set high standards for fundamental work, although he meant

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play the largest roles in this book agreed to provide their own recollections in interviews that sometimes extended over many sessions: Hans Bethe, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann, Julian Schwinger, Victor Weisskopf, John Archibald Wheeler, and Robert R. Wilson. Feynman’s own voice is everywhere in his published work, of course, and toward

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. 277 ALTHOUGH ‘ONE’ IS NOT PERFECTLY: Bernstein 1987, 63. 277 THEY ALSO WORRIED ABOUT SCHWINCER’S ABILITY: Sheldon Glashow, interview, Cambridge, Mass. 277 MURRAY GELL-MANN LATER SPENT A SEMESTER: Murray Gell-Mann, interviews, Pasadena and Chicago. 278 THERE WAS A NEW NOTE: E.g., Virginia Prewett, “I Homesteaded in Brazil,” Saturday Evening Post, 22 April

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Burton Richter provided useful on-site guidance at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center; James Bjorken, George Zweig, Sidney Drell, Yung-Su Tsai, and, of course, Murray Gell-Mann were among those with especially helpful reminiscences. For the record of Feynman’s illnesses I relied on notes and correspondence in his files and interviews

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AT FIRST HE KEPT HER PRESENCE SECRET: Gweneth Feynman, Gell-Mann, interviews. 346 SO THIS IS HOW WE’RE STARTING LIFE: Gweneth Feynman, interview. 346 MURRAY GELL-MANN, WHO HAD MARRIED: Gell-Mann 1989a, 50. 346 AN IMAGE LODGED IN GELL-MANN’S MEMORY: Ibid. 347 HELLO, MY SWEETHEART: Feynman to Gweneth Feynman

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of Ponderable Bodies,” Journal of the Franklin institute 225 (1938):277. Quoted by Schweber, forthcoming. 366 AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE LAW: CPL, 169. 367 AFTERWARD, MURRAY GELL-MANN “COUNTERED”: SYJ, 290. 367 THEY COUNTED A CERTAIN NUMBER: CPL, 169. 367 “YES,” SAYS THE ASTRONOMER: Ibid., 170. 368 TO DYSON’S ASTONISHMENT: Dyson to

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RAGE COULD BE HEARD: E.g., Tuck, interview. 411 OF COURSE IT WASN’T TRUE: SYJ, 229. He also changed “Murray Gell-Mann and I wrote a paper on the theory” to “Murray Gell-Mann compared and combined our ideas and wrote a paper on the theory” (232). Gell-Mann still called it “that joke book

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de Guixols, Catalunya, Spain. ——. 1989a. “Dick Feynman—The Guy Down the Hall.” Physics Today, February, 50. ——. 1989b. Remarks at a Conference Celebrating the Birthday of Murray Gell-Mann, 27–28 January. Gell-Mann, Murray, and Ne’eman, Yuval. 1964. The Eightfold Way. New York: Benjamin. Gemant, Andrew. 1961. The Nature of the Genius

The Infinity Puzzle

by Frank Close  · 29 Nov 2011  · 449pp  · 123,459 words

or T turned out to be flawed, and new experiments favored a combination of V and A. Marshak discussed the matter with several colleagues, including Murray Gell-Mann, a young theorist who would almost single-handedly redefine the frontiers of particle physics. However, that would come later, as we shall see. Meanwhile, unaware

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a possibility for physics to make a great advance. However, it would turn out that there are many possible paths through the Yang-Mills jungle. Murray Gell-Mann, who also had recognized the V – A option, spent a considerable amount of 1958 and ’59 trying to unite weak and electromagnetic forces but failed

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with his pursuit of a unified theory. Fortune came his way the next year, 1960, following a seminar that he gave in Paris, attended by Murray Gell-Mann. Gell-Mann was only three years older than Glashow but already had a huge reputation. By the age of thirty he had introduced the concept

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and Z 0. To see how, we need to take a brief detour. “ess-you-two-cross-you-one” At the beginning of the 1960s Murray Gell-Mann was becoming interested in the branch of mathematics known as group theory. This classifies sets of common things into families—the groups. The multitude of

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Israeli theorist Yuval Ne’eman had identified the group SU3 as a way of describing the properties of the hadrons—a feature independently discovered by Murray Gell-Mann. At one point in 1965, Salam thought that he had found the ultimate description of strong interactions, marrying SU3 with the theory of relativity in

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in his singleminded refusal to give up attempting to tame the Infinity Puzzle. “And Now I Introduce Mr. ’t Hooft” 209 In 1961 Glashow and Murray Gell-Mann at Cal Tech had been investigating mathematical group theory, and Gell-Mann had become interested in the way these techniques lead to Yang-Mills theory

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Michel Levy had established the Institut des Sciences at Cargese, adjacent to a beach. That already made a memorable environment. He had also worked with Murray Gell-Mann, and they had invented the “pi sigma model,” which built on the original ideas of Nambu and went beyond the original ideas of Matthews and

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his equations. part  revelation Chapter 12 b. j. and the cosmic quarks Birth of the quark model: George Zweig is told it’s complete rubbish; Murray Gell-Mann says quarks are unphysical; James “B. J.” Bjorken has a big idea, which leads to their discovery. Feynman invents the “parton model.” The strong force

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a limb in 1966. For the idea that quarks might be concrete particles—real particles—had been widely disparaged at the time, not least by Murray Gell-Mann, one of the creators of the quark model. That the proton and the neutron are not the ultimate seeds of the atomic nucleus was already

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my thesis on the quark model. the quark model The idea of quarks had been born in 1964, independently by two Americans, George Zweig and Murray Gell-Mann. By the 1960s, experiments with cosmic rays and at accelerators had revealed scores of hadrons. In 1962 Gell-Mann found a way of gathering the

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” came to nothing, there was retribution following the earlier hyperbole. In 1965 Salam ran a research conference at the new International Centre in Trieste.27 Murray Gell-Mann had given one of the talks, and in the questions afterward was asked about “U-twiddle-12.” The episode may have become embellished in memories

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Glashow’s and was very conscious that Glashow had made his entrance in the electroweak unification saga in his doctoral thesis, his insight recognized by Murray Gell-Mann at the fateful lunch in France in 1960. Glashow had then developed and completed his publications during his time in Cal Tech, which is where

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spontaneous symmetry breaking into the mix relative to having identified the importance of SU2 × U1. This has been the subject of much debate. In particular, Murray Gell-Mann said that he had “argued a little bit” with 310 the infinity puzzle the Nobel authorities: “the only time I ever have.”47 While he

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. Zweig, e-mail to the author, October 3, 2010, and Memories of Murray and the Quark Model: talk presented at the “Conference in Honor of Murray Gell-Mann’s 80th Birthday,” Nanyang Technical University, Singapore, February 24, 2010. 5. Bjorken, e-mail to the author, October 1, 2010. 6. Recall that in 1960

Coming of Age in the Milky Way

by Timothy Ferris  · 30 Jun 1988  · 661pp  · 169,298 words

aid and criticism provided by William Alexander, Sherry Arden, Hans Bethe, Nancy Brackett, Ken Broede, Robert Brucato, Lisa Drew, Ann Druyan, David Falk, Andrew Fraknoi, Murray Gell-Mann, Owen Gingerich, J. Richard Gott III, Stephen Jay Gould, Alan Guth, Stephen Hawking, He Xiang Tao, Karen Hitzig, Larry Hughes, Res Jost, Kathy Lowry, Owen

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exclusion principle, let each skater wear a hoopskirt that forbids their colliding…. And that is quite enough of that. *The name “quark” was conferred by Murray Gell-Mann, the Caltech physicist who came up with the idea. It comes from a line in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, “Three quarks for Muster Mark

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and weak forces? That question was taken up by one of the first to appreciate the beauty of the Yang-Mills approach, the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann. Some smart scientists (Dirac, Bohr, and the elder Einstein) are modest in demeanor. Others are brash. (Wolfgang Pauli disrupted Yang’s first explication of gauge

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it did not fare well, and most physicists soon dropped the idea. One of the few to appreciate its potential was (once again) the perspicacious Murray Gell-Mann, who encouraged the American physicist John Schwarz that even if string theory appeared sterile at present, “somehow, sometime, somewhere, it would still be useful.”31

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and quasars, while cosmologists were hiring on at CERN and Fermilab to do high-energy physics at underground installations blind to the stars. By 1985, Murray Gell-Mann could declare that “elementary particle physics and the study of the very early universe, the two most fundamental branches of natural science, have, essentially, merged

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finds that the Cepheid variable stars used in measuring intergalactic distances actually come in two varieties, with different magnitude-periodicity relationships, Time: 1953 Noteworthy Events: Murray Gell-Mann proposes a new quantum number called strangeness, notes that it is conserved in strong interactions. Time: 1954 Noteworthy Events: Walter Baade and Rudolph Minkowski identify

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redshift in the spectral lines of a quasar, indicating that quasars are the most distant class of objects in the universe. Time: 1964 Noteworthy Events: Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig independently propose that protons, neutrons, and other hadrons are composed of still smaller particles, which Gell-Mann dubs “quarks.” Noteworthy Events: The

The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

by Michael Strevens  · 12 Oct 2020

integral to the science below. The same is true today. Yet it is not as if the strangeness of the theory is invisible to scientists. Murray Gell-Mann, the discoverer of quarks, called quantum mechanics a “mysterious, confusing discipline.” According to Roger Penrose, one of the late twentieth century’s foremost mathematical physicists

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in Figure 10.7—than like Byrhtferth’s realization of the power of four? Or would someone find hidden order and simplicity in the zoo? Murray Gell-Mann grew up in straitened circumstances in New York City, the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe who never quite secured their hold on the American

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-Mann had predicted the omega-minus, and sure enough it—or rather its distinctive bubble-chamber signature, shown in Figure 10.13—had been observed. Murray Gell-Mann had secured his Nobel Prize. Figure 10.12. A decuplet that would be completed by a particle filling the gray zone at the bottom left

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French), or thinkers as familiar with history and literature as they are with the technical apparatus of their craft, such as Stephen Jay Gould and Murray Gell-Mann. They may write books about beauty in nature that celebrate the ideas of Pythagoras and Plato, like the theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek. They may champion

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wide open to untrammeled Cartesian hubbub. Indeed, scientific discovery relies to a not inconsiderable extent on this furtive openness, which has allowed thinkers such as Murray Gell-Mann, D’Arcy Thompson, and Albert Einstein to use their aesthetic and philosophical senses in the search for extraordinary theories. These great scientists were exceptional in

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’s scheme also implied the existence of another particle, the eta, just as experimenters were beginning to see evidence for it in their data. 233 Murray Gell-Mann had secured his Nobel Prize: The prize was awarded in 1969. Along with the Nobel’s exclusivity come invidious distinctions. Each of Gell-Mann’s

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. New York: Knopf, 2016. Jasanoff, S. “Transparency in Public Science: Purposes, Reasons, Limits.” Law and Contemporary Problems 69 (2006): 21–45. Johnson, G. Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics. New York: Knopf, 1999. Keller, A. “Has Science Created Technology?” Minerva 22 (1984): 160–82. Kennefick, D. “Testing

The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far

by Lawrence M. Krauss  · 21 Mar 2017  · 335pp  · 95,280 words

Corporation in Los Angeles and invited Sudarshan and another student to join him. The two most renowned particle theorists in the world then, Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann, were at Caltech, and each had become obsessed with unraveling the form of the weak interaction. Feynman had missed out on the discovery of parity

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to be heavy since the interactions it mediated would have to be weak as well. Glashow’s ideas were reported to the physics community by Murray Gell-Mann at the 1960 Rochester meeting, as Gell-Mann had by then recruited Glashow to Caltech to work in Gell-Mann’s group. Glashow’s paper

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complex interactions between nucleons and other particles. In response to this notion that some kind of Yang-Mills symmetry might be behind the strong interaction, Murray Gell-Mann developed an elegant symmetry scheme he labeled in a Zen-like fashion the Eightfold Way. It not only allowed a classification of eight different vector

The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite

by Ann Finkbeiner  · 26 Mar 2007

: “I wasn’t about to stop working in physics,” he said. Watson, Brueckner, and Murph—along with a fourth, younger member of Theoretical Physics, Incorporated, Murray Gell-Mann—appointed themselves the first steering committee. Next, Jason had to get the right people. With the cooperation of York and Townes, the new steering committee

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science but also on social science—an area not typically undertaken by physicists. Jason briefly got into the social science of the insurgency anyway because Murray Gell-Mann, whose interests were catholic and compelling, was interested in human behavior. “To some of his Jason colleagues,” Gell-Mann’s biographer wrote, “Gell-Mann seemed

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’t moo. To work out glitches in the system, DCPG conducted field tests. Jack Ruina went “trudging through Panama jungles,” with several Jasons—among them Murray Gell-Mann—to see how well the sound sensors worked, “given the wildlife and whatnot, the acoustical conditions,” Ruina said. After the test, he said, “Murray decided

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but fascism. I oppose it on any forum I see, whether from the right or the left. And I will not be part of it.’” Murray Gell-Mann had a similar experience at the Collège de France in Paris. When he insisted on giving his lecture, the college administrators escorted him out of

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places like Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley, but also at the relatively less spectacular UCSD. Nobel Prizes Eugene Wigner, Charles Townes, Hans Bethe, Luis Alvarez, Murray Gell-Mann, Steven Weinberg, Val Fitch, Leon Lederman, and Henry Kendall won Nobel Prizes in, respectively, 1963, 1964, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1979, 1980, 1988, and 1990. Four

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al. Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos During the Oppenheimer Years, 1943–1945. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Johnson, George. Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics. New York: Vintage Books, 1999. Kevles, Daniel. The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America

The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of Everything

by John Gribbin  · 29 Nov 2009  · 185pp  · 55,639 words

table, at the start of the next phase of development of particle physics. The classification system was arrived at independently by two physicists, the American Murray Gell-Mann (born in 1929) and the Israeli Yuval Ne'eman, born in 1925. Ne'eman's education and career were interrupted by the fighting in the

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a fourth quark, which Glashow gave the name ‘charm’, in order to tidy up the theoretical interpretation of some other puzzling experimental observations. In 1971, Murray Gell-Mann and Harald Fritzsch, who was born in Zwickau in 1943, and is now Research Professor of Physics at the Max-Planck Institute for Physics in

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the twentieth century, when Chen Ning Yang and Robert Mills found a way to describe the strong interaction in terms of Lie groups, and then Murray Gell-Mann and Yuval Ne'eman (working independently of one another) found that SU(3) provided a framework for describing mathematically the relationships between elementary particles. Since

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ago by one of the greatest physicists of all time. Fritzsch, H., Quarks, Pelican, London, 1984. The author is a German physicist who worked with Murray Gell-Mann on the theory that became known as quantum chromodynamics, the ‘colour’ theory of quarks. The book, first published in German in 1981, provides a very

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and 8419/TH412. A more accessible, but secondhand, account is given by Pickering. 19 Isgur, page 439, 1981. In the same report, Zweig says that ‘Murray Gell-Mann once told me that he sent his first quark paper to Physics Letters for publication because he was certain that Physical Review Letters would not

What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge

by Marcus Du Sautoy  · 18 May 2016

line) that prevented them from crossing via the easy route to the lower valley. THERE IS NO EXQUISITE BEAUTY WITHOUT STRANGENESS The physicists Abraham Pais, Murray Gell-Mann and Kazuhiko Nishijima came up with a cunning strategy to solve this puzzle. They proposed a new property like charge that mediated the way these

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trip to Cambridge. THE VEGETARIAN BUTCHER John Polkinghorne learned his physics at the feet of Paul Dirac in Cambridge and then with Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann at Caltech. You can’t ask for better teachers than that. His research has, among other things, helped to confirm the existence of the quarks

My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance

by Emanuel Derman  · 1 Jan 2004  · 313pp  · 101,403 words

be considered a composite of all the rest. In Cape Town in the summer of 1964, we heard popular lectures about the work of physicists Murray Gell-Mann and Yuval Ne'eman, both modern-day Mendeleyevs, who each invented their own periodic table of particles. Some of the subtables in their system contained

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to be at war with Beg, and we heard reports of prolonged shouting matches. We also heard that Pais had made a bitter enemy of Murray Gell-Mann, his 1950s collaborator, who, according to George Johnson's biography of Gell-Mann, always referred to Pais as "the evil dwarf." After what I had

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

by Annie Jacobsen  · 14 Sep 2015  · 558pp  · 164,627 words

Alamos weapons developer, had studied at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory with Watson and Goldberger and at the Institute for Advanced Study alongside John von Neumann. Murray Gell-Mann, the youngest member, had been a doctoral student of Manhattan Project giant Victor Weisskopf, and was someone Goldberger considered a prodigy. The four physicists agreed

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was an honor to be asked.” Goldberger remembered that “everyone was excited, full of ideas, and very patriotic.” Murph Goldberger, Keith Brueckner, Kenneth Watson, and Murray Gell-Mann drew up a list of their most respected colleagues and asked them to participate. The group’s first meeting took place at IDA headquarters in

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. The Jasons were quintessential defense scientists, following in the footsteps of John von Neumann, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller. The core group, including Murph Goldberger, Murray Gell-Mann, John Wheeler, and William Nierenberg, had been closely intertwined, academically, since the Manhattan Project during World War II. In the early 1960s, the Jasons began

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originators of the Jason concept were being met when the Vietnam War intervened,” said Gordon MacDonald, who joined the Jasons in the summer of 1963. “Murray Gell-Mann called to ask if I’d like to join Jason. I respected Murray a great deal,” and said yes to joining. The first year as

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explosions, things of that sort.” But as individual Jasons became interested in Vietnam, so did the group. The first Jason to be very interested was Murray Gell-Mann. Gell-Mann was one of the most respected thinkers in the Jason group, and one of the most esoteric. In 1969 he would win the

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not the first time the Jasons examined what Goldberger called “the Vietnam problem,” but it was the first time they wrote a report about it. Murray Gell-Mann invited the revered war correspondent and political scientist Bernard Fall to come and speak to the Jason scientists that summer in La Jolla. In 1964

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, and in the process, there was growing discord among them about how to proceed, specifically in the scientific gray area called social science. Some, like Murray Gell-Mann, saw promise in understanding human motivation. Others believed that using advanced technology was the only way to win the war. In Gordon MacDonald’s opinion

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vandalized. In New York City, a consortium of professors at Columbia demanded that the scientists resign from Jason or resign from the university. In Paris, Murray Gell-Mann was booed off a stage. Riot police were called to a physics symposium in Trieste where Jason scientist Eugene Wigner was speaking as an honored

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, 2013. Jenkins, Brian Michael. Countering al Qaeda: An Appreciation of the Situation and Suggestions for Strategy. Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2002. Johnson, George. Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. Johnston, Rob, Ph.D. Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community

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