Dr. Murray Gell-Mann, a physicist at California Institute of Technology. Photo by Nat Farbman.
Gallery of Murray Gell-Mann
1964
Pasadena, California, United States
Theoretical Physicist Dr. Murray Gell-Mann in 1964.
Gallery of Murray Gell-Mann
1969
Hötorget 8, 103 87 Stockholm, Swede
The winners of the 1969 Nobel Prizes stand together before the award presentation by King Gustaf VI Adolf, of Sweden. Left to right are Professor Murray Gell-Mann of the United States, in physics; Professor Derek H.R. Barton of the United Kingdom, in chemistry; Professor Odd Hassel of Norway, in chemistry; Professor Max Delbruck of the United States, in medicine; Alfred D. Hershey, of the United States, in medicine; Salvador E. Luria of the United States, in medicine; and Professor Jan Tinbergen of the Netherlands, in economics.
Gallery of Murray Gell-Mann
1983
United States
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann in 1983. Photo by Kevin Fleming.
Gallery of Murray Gell-Mann
1995
Germany
Murray Gell-Man in 2007.
Gallery of Murray Gell-Mann
2005
Ellis Island, New York City, New York, United States
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann attends the 2005 Ellis Island Family Heritage Award in Ellis Island historic main hall on April 19, 2005, in New York City. Photo by Ramin Talaie.
Gallery of Murray Gell-Mann
2005
Ellis Island, New York City, New York, United States
Vintner Robert Mondavi, former United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, Nobel Prize winner in Physics Murray Gell-Mann, and Astronaut Scott Parazynski, 2005 Ellis Island Family Heritage Award recipients, stand together after the awards ceremony on Ellis Island April 19, 2005, in New York City. The awards are given annually to Ellis Island immigrants or their descendants who excel in their professions. Photo by Stephen Chernin.
Gallery of Murray Gell-Mann
2007
Germany
Murray Gell-Man in 2007.
Gallery of Murray Gell-Mann
2007
Germany
Murray Gell-Man in 2007.
Gallery of Murray Gell-Mann
2010
Wuhan, China
Murray Gell-Mann, an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles, gives a lecture in Huazhong Normal University on May 11, 2010, in Wuhan, China.
Gallery of Murray Gell-Mann
2012
300 Doheny Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90048, United States
Murray Gell-Mann, David Agus, Tony Bennett, and Carmen A. Puliafito attend USC Center for Applied Molecular Medicine's "Rebels With A Cause" Gala at Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills on September 19, 2012, in Beverly Hills, California. Photo by Brian To.
Gallery of Murray Gell-Mann
2012
300 Doheny Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90048, United States
Murray Gell-Mann attends USC Center for Applied Molecular Medicine's "Rebels With A Cause" Gala at Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills on September 19, 2012, in Beverly Hills, California. Photo by Brian To.
Gallery of Murray Gell-Mann
2012
300 Doheny Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90048, United States
Sumner Redstone, Tony Bennett, David Agus, and Murray Gell-Mann, attend USC Center for Applied Molecular Medicine's "Rebels With A Cause" Gala at Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills on September 19, 2012, in Beverly Hills, California. Photo by Brian To.
Gallery of Murray Gell-Mann
2012
300 Doheny Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90048, United States
Talia Shire and Murray Gell-Mann attend USC Center for Applied Molecular Medicine's "Rebels With A Cause" Gala at Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills on September 19, 2012, in Beverly Hills, California. Photo by Brian To.
Achievements
Membership
Royal Society
Murray Gell-Mann was a member of the Royal Society.
National Academy of Sciences
Murray Gell-Mann was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
American Physical Society
Murray Gell-Mann was a member of the American Physical Society.
Russian Academy of Sciences
Murray Gell-Mann was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Murray Gell-Mann was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Indian National Science Academy
Murray Gell-Mann was a member of the Indian National Science Academy.
American Philosophical Society
Murray Gell-Mann was a member of the American Philosophical Society.
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Murray Gell-Mann was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Awards
Nobel Prize in Physics
1969
Hötorget 8, 103 87 Stockholm, Swede
The presentation of the Nobel Prize went according to tradition on December 10, 1969, at the Stockholm Concert Hall with King Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden presenting the awards. He congratulates Professor Murray Gell-Mann of the California Institute of Technology after he receives his prize in physics.
Golden Plate Award
Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award
Franklin Medal
John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science
The presentation of the Nobel Prize went according to tradition on December 10, 1969, at the Stockholm Concert Hall with King Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden presenting the awards. He congratulates Professor Murray Gell-Mann of the California Institute of Technology after he receives his prize in physics.
The winners of the 1969 Nobel Prizes stand together before the award presentation by King Gustaf VI Adolf, of Sweden. Left to right are Professor Murray Gell-Mann of the United States, in physics; Professor Derek H.R. Barton of the United Kingdom, in chemistry; Professor Odd Hassel of Norway, in chemistry; Professor Max Delbruck of the United States, in medicine; Alfred D. Hershey, of the United States, in medicine; Salvador E. Luria of the United States, in medicine; and Professor Jan Tinbergen of the Netherlands, in economics.
Ellis Island, New York City, New York, United States
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann attends the 2005 Ellis Island Family Heritage Award in Ellis Island historic main hall on April 19, 2005, in New York City. Photo by Ramin Talaie.
Ellis Island, New York City, New York, United States
Vintner Robert Mondavi, former United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, Nobel Prize winner in Physics Murray Gell-Mann, and Astronaut Scott Parazynski, 2005 Ellis Island Family Heritage Award recipients, stand together after the awards ceremony on Ellis Island April 19, 2005, in New York City. The awards are given annually to Ellis Island immigrants or their descendants who excel in their professions. Photo by Stephen Chernin.
Murray Gell-Mann, an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles, gives a lecture in Huazhong Normal University on May 11, 2010, in Wuhan, China.
300 Doheny Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90048, United States
Murray Gell-Mann, David Agus, Tony Bennett, and Carmen A. Puliafito attend USC Center for Applied Molecular Medicine's "Rebels With A Cause" Gala at Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills on September 19, 2012, in Beverly Hills, California. Photo by Brian To.
300 Doheny Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90048, United States
Murray Gell-Mann attends USC Center for Applied Molecular Medicine's "Rebels With A Cause" Gala at Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills on September 19, 2012, in Beverly Hills, California. Photo by Brian To.
300 Doheny Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90048, United States
Sumner Redstone, Tony Bennett, David Agus, and Murray Gell-Mann, attend USC Center for Applied Molecular Medicine's "Rebels With A Cause" Gala at Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills on September 19, 2012, in Beverly Hills, California. Photo by Brian To.
300 Doheny Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90048, United States
Talia Shire and Murray Gell-Mann attend USC Center for Applied Molecular Medicine's "Rebels With A Cause" Gala at Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills on September 19, 2012, in Beverly Hills, California. Photo by Brian To.
(Complex adaptive systems are all around us, and include s...)
Complex adaptive systems are all around us, and include such diverse examples as the immune system, the world economy, and the study of language. The evolution of human languages has been the most recent research activity of the Santa Fe Institute. Among the themes of this research are the search for general principles of complex adaptive systems, their broad implications, and how the study of language contributes to, and learns from, the general questions of complexity and evolution. In addition, such diverse topics as dating and origin of human language; the relationship between complexity, evolution, and the similarities and regularities in grammatical processes across language; the evolution of language universals; the phylogeny of language; the role of complexity in language change; and language acquisition by children are all explored.
(Two dozen leading archaeologists isolate a number of them...)
Two dozen leading archaeologists isolate a number of themes that were central to the process of increasing complexity in prehistoric Southwestern society, including increased food production, a greater degree of sedentism, and a dramatically increasing population.
(This monograph presents thirty research papers dealing wi...)
This monograph presents thirty research papers dealing with the classification of strongly interacting particles and their interaction according to the eightfold way. In each chapter, the authors' commentary introduces the reprints.
(A great variety of complex phenomena in many scientific f...)
A great variety of complex phenomena in many scientific fields exhibit power-law behavior, reflecting a hierarchical or fractal structure. Many of these phenomena seem to be susceptible to description using approaches drawn from thermodynamics or statistical mechanics, particularly approaches involving the maximization of entropy and of Boltzmann-Gibbs statistical mechanics and standard laws in a natural way. The book addresses the interdisciplinary applications of these ideas, and also on various phenomena that could possibly be quantitatively describable in terms of these ideas.
(The Science Book presents the fascinating story behind th...)
The Science Book presents the fascinating story behind these and other of the world's most important concepts in maths, chemistry, physics, and biology in plain English, with easy to grasp "mind maps" and eye-catching artworks. Albert Einstein once quoted Isaac Newton: "If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Follow context panels in The Science Book to trace how one scientist's ideas informed the next. See, for example, how Alan Turing's "universal computing machine" in the 1940s led to smartphones, or how Carl Linnaeus's classifications led to Darwin's theory of evolution, the sequencing of the human genome and lifesaving gene therapies.
(Today it is known that the atomic nuclei are composed of ...)
Today it is known that the atomic nuclei are composed of smaller constituents, the quarks. A quark is always bound with two other quarks, forming a baryon or with an antiquark, forming a meson. The quark model was first postulated in 1964 by Murray Gell-Mann - who coined the name "quark" from James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake - and by George Zweig, who then worked at CERN. In the present theory of strong interactions - Quantum Chromodynamics proposed by H. Fritzsch and Gell-Mann in 1972 - the forces that bind the quarks together are due to the exchange of eight gluons. On the 50th anniversary of the quark model, this invaluable volume looks back at the developments and achievements in the elementary particle physics that eventuated from that beautiful model. Written by an international team of distinguished physicists, each of whom have made major developments in the field, the volume provides an essential overview of the present state to the academics and researchers.
Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984–2019
(Over the last three decades, the Santa Fe Institute and i...)
Over the last three decades, the Santa Fe Institute and its network of researchers have been pursuing a revolution in science. Ignoring the boundaries of disciplines and schools and searching for novel fundamental ideas, theories, and practices, this international community integrates the full range of scientific inquiries that will help us to understand and survive on a complex planet. This volume collects essays from the past thirty years of research, in which contributors explain in clear and accessible language many of the deepest challenges and insights of complexity science. Explore the evolution of complex systems science with chapters from Nobel Laureates Murray Gell-Mann and Kenneth Arrow, as well as numerous pioneering complexity researchers, including John Holland, Brian Arthur, Robert May, Richard Lewontin, Jennifer Dunne, and Geoffrey West.
Murray Gell-Mann was an American physicist. He is the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969 for his work pertaining to the classification of subatomic particles and their interactions.
Background
Murray Gell-Mann was born on September 15, 1929, in New York City, New York, United States to the family of Arthur Gell-Mann and Pauline Reichstein, both Eastern European immigrants. At the time, his father operated a language school. Born Isidore Gellmann in a small town in what was then Galicia, near the Russian border, the elder Gell-Mann had studied mathematics and philosophy in Vienna. He changed his name to Arthur and apparently added the hyphen sometime after 1911 when he was called to New York by his parents, who had emigrated earlier and were having financial problems. During the Depression, the language school failed and the family, which included an older son, Ben, moved to cheaper quarters on 188th Street in the Bronx, near the Bronx Zoo, and later to the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
This was long before the time when an apartment in the neighborhood conferred a prestigious address. In an oral history interview, Murray Gell-Mann recalled living in hard times. His father, he said, though intellectually curious, struggled to make a living, finding a back-office job on Wall Street, working for a toy importer and, finally, securing a position at a bank "at a very low salary."
Education
Young Murray Gell-Mann was already showing signs of precociousness, multiplying large numbers in his head and correcting his elders on the pronunciation of foreign words. With the encouragement of his mother and help from a piano teacher who gave lessons at a local settlement house, he won a scholarship to Columbia Grammar, a private school on West 93rd Street, where he earned the nickname "the Walking Encyclopedia."
Graduating as valedictorian at age 14, Gell-Mann went to Yale, also on scholarship. But physics was not his first choice as a major area of study, he said in the oral history. He considered archaeology or a field related to natural history. His father, however, pushed him to choose engineering, saying it would lead to a well-paying job. Murray resisted, and they settled on physics as a compromise, and he soon found that the subject fascinated him. He obtained his Bachelor of Science at Yale University in 1948, and his Doctor of Philosophy in 1951 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His doctoral research on subatomic particles was influential in the later work of the Nobel laureate 1963 Eugene P. Wigner.
In 1952 Gell-Mann joined the Institute for Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago. The following year he introduced the concept of "strangeness," a quantum property that accounted for previously puzzling decay patterns of certain mesons. As defined by Gell-Mann, strangeness is conserved when any subatomic particle interacts via the strong force - i.e., the force that binds the components of the atomic nucleus. Gell-Mann joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena in 1955 and was appointed the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics in 1967 (emeritus, 1993).
In 1961 Gell-Mann and Yuval Ne’eman, an Israeli theoretical physicist, independently proposed a scheme for classifying previously discovered strongly interacting particles into a simple orderly arrangement of families. Called the Eightfold Way (after Buddha’s Eightfold Path to Enlightenment and bliss), the scheme grouped mesons and baryons (e.g., protons and neutrons) into multiplets of 1, 8, 10, or 27 members on the basis of various properties. All particles in the same multiplet are to be thought of as variant states of the same basic particle. Gell-Mann speculated that it should be possible to explain certain properties of known particles in terms of even more fundamental particles, or building blocks. He later called these basic bits of matter "quarks," adopting the fanciful term from James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake. One of the early successes of Gell-Mann's quark hypothesis was the prediction and subsequent discovery of the omega-minus particle (1964). Over the years, research has yielded other findings that have led to the wide acceptance and elaboration of the quark concept.
Gell-Mann published a number of works on this phase of his career, notable among which were The Eightfold Way (1964), written in collaboration with Ne’eman, and Broken Scale Variance and the Light Cone (1971), coauthored with K. Wilson.
In 1984 Gell-Mann co-founded the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit center located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that supports research concerning complex adaptive systems and emergent phenomena associated with complexity. In "Let’s Call It Plectics," a 1995 article in the institute’s journal, Complexity, he coined the word plectics to describe the type of research supported by the institute. In The Quark and the Jaguar (1994), Gell-Mann gave a fuller description of the ideas concerning the relationship between the basic laws of physics (the quark) and the emergent phenomena of life (the jaguar).
Gell-Mann was a director of the MacArthur Foundation (1979-2002) and served on the President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (1994-2001). He also was a member of the board of directors of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Gell-Mann described his political position as "fanatic centrist." During the 1960s and 1970s, Gell-Mann played an active part in arms control, trying to persuade people on both the United States and Soviet sides that the notion of anti-ballistic missile defense of large areas, such as cities, was not only "very difficult and extremely expensive," but also "extremely dangerous," because it is destabilizing, increasing the incentive for a first strike. He was disheartened by the reappearance of this destabilizing plan in President Reagan's "Star Wars" proposal.
Views
Much as atoms can be slotted into the rows and columns of the periodic table of the elements, Gell-Mann found a way, in 1961, to classify their smaller pieces - subatomic particles like protons, neutrons, and mesons, which were being discovered by the dozen in cosmic rays and particle accelerator blasts. Arranged according to their properties, the particles clustered in groups of eight and 10.
In a moment of whimsy, Gell-Mann, who hadn’t a mystical bone in his body, named his system the Eightfold Way after the Buddha’s eight-step path to enlightenment. He groaned ever after when people mistakenly inferred that particle physics was somehow related to Eastern philosophy.
Looking deeper, Gell-Mann realized that the patterns of the Eightfold Way could be further divided into triplets of even smaller components. He decided to call them quarks after a line from James Joyce’s "Finnegans Wake": "Three quarks for Muster Mark."
With Gell-Mann at the forefront, physics took on a Joycean feel. Before long there were up quarks and down quarks, strange quarks and charm quarks, top quarks and bottom quarks, all stuck together with particles called gluons. The funny nomenclature was as much a Gell-Mann inspiration as the mathematics.es would discover the same fundamental laws. Some people believe otherwise, he added, "and I think that is utter baloney."
As with strangeness, the Eightfold Way and quarks were independently discovered by other theorists, but the breadth of Gell-Mann’s accomplishments and his flair for nomenclature ensured that his would be the name most remembered.
Gell-Mann's instincts weren’t infallible. At first, he dismissed quarks as mathematical abstractions - an accounting device with no real correlate in the physical world. There was good reason for his skepticism: Quarks would have to have electrical charges measured in thirds, something that was never observed.
After quarks were confirmed indirectly in an experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, in Menlo Park, California, Gell-Mann denied that he had ever doubted their existence. He went on to help explain how the tiny particles are permanently stuck together, keeping their fractional charges hidden from view. A "green" quark, a "red" quark, and a "blue" quark (the labels were arbitrary) blended to form a "colorless" proton. It was Gell-Mann who named the theory quantum chromodynamics.
By this time he was becoming known for his abrasive style, cutting down colleagues with withering remarks or saddling some of them with derisive names. The physicist Abraham Pais became "the evil dwarf." The renowned experimenter Leon Lederman (who died last October) was "the plumber." But those who could abide Gell-Mann’s prickliness found the intellectual pugilism exciting.
Gell-Mann was an early champion of superstrings, hypothetical particles that, if ever verified, would be even more fundamental than quarks. Later in his career, he began thinking in other directions, puzzling over the way simple laws of physics give rise to the beauty and intricacy of the living world. He explored the idea in a popular book, "The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex" (1994).
Gell-Mann’s interests extended to historical linguistics, archeology, natural history, the psychology of creative thinking, and other subjects connected with biological and cultural evolution and with learning. Much of his late research at the Santa Fe Institute has focused on the theory of complex adaptive systems, which brings many of those topics together.
Quotations:
"You don't need something more to get something more. That's what emergence means."
"If I have seen further than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarfs."
"Niels Bohr brain-washed a whole generation of physicists into believing that the problem had been solved fifty years ago [Gell-Mann's comment on the Copenhagen interpretation]."
"While many questions about quantum mechanics are still not fully resolved, there is no point in introducing needless mystification where in fact no problem exists."
"The false report that measuring one of the photons immediately affects the other leads to all sorts of unfortunate conclusions."
Membership
Murray Gell-Mann was a member of the Royal Society, National Academy of Sciences, American Physical Society, Russian Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Indian National Science Academy, American Philosophical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the JASON Defense Advisory Group.
Royal Society
,
United Kingdom
National Academy of Sciences
,
United States
American Physical Society
,
United States
Russian Academy of Sciences
,
Russia
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
,
United States
Indian National Science Academy
,
India
American Philosophical Society
,
United States
American Association for the Advancement of Science
,
United States
JASON Defense Advisory Group
,
United States
Personality
Gell-Mann was conversant in several languages and fascinated by archaeology, linguistics, natural history, and ornithology.
With his hyphenated surname and cosmopolitan ways, Gell-Mann liked to keep people wondering about his pedigree. The physicist Sheldon Glashow once recalled a party at which his colleague cagily spun a tale about the confluence in Scotland of the River Gell and the River Mann.
Gell-Mann also had a compulsion, upon meeting new people, to provide them with the etymology and proper pronunciation of their names, going on to expound on seemingly any subject under the sun. Some found him charming, others exasperating. No one doubted the immensity of his mind.
Quotes from others about the person
"One of the things that makes Gell-Mann so insufferable is that he is almost always right." - John Horgan, American science journalist
Murray Gell-Mann was in 1955 married to J. Margaret Dow; they had a daughter, Elizabeth, and a son, Nicholas. In 1992, a little more than a decade after his wife, Margaret, died of cancer, he married Marcia Southwick, a poet he had met in Aspen, Colorado, where he had a summer home.