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.

Career

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.

Achievements

• Murray Gell-Mann was the leading figure in the study of elementary particle physics in the middle years of the 20th century. His work transformed the way that physicists conceive matter at the smallest length scales. In 1969 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles.
  
  In 1988 Professor Gell-Mann was listed on the United Nations Environmental Program’s Roll of Honor for Environmental Achievement (The Global 500). He also shared the 1989 Ettore Majorana "Science for Peace" prize. Earlier, he was given the Ernest O. Lawrence Memorial Award of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute, the Research Corporation Award, and the John J. Carty Medal of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2005 Gell-Mann was awarded the Albert Einstein Medal. He has received honorary degrees from many universities, including Yale, Columbia, the University of Chicago, Cambridge, and Oxford. In 1994 the University of Florida awarded him an honorary degree in Environmental Studies.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Themes in Southwest Prehistory

    (Two dozen leading archaeologists isolate a number of them...)

    1994
  • The Science Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained

    (The Science Book presents the fascinating story behind th...)

    2014
  • The Eightfold Way

    (This monograph presents thirty research papers dealing wi...)

    2000
  • The Evolution Of Human Languages

    (Complex adaptive systems are all around us, and include s...)

    1991
  • Nonextensive Entropy: Interdisciplinary Applications

    (A great variety of complex phenomena in many scientific f...)

    2004
  • The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex

    (From one of the architects of the new science of simplici...)

    1994
  • 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...)

    2019
  • 50 Years of Quarks

    (Today it is known that the atomic nuclei are composed of ...)

    2015
  • The Regular and the Random 2004
  • Particle Physics 2005
  • Murray Gell-mann: Selected Papers 2010
  • Isotopic spin and new unstable particles 1952

Religion

Murray Gell-Mann was an Agnostic.

Politics

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.

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  Royal Society , United Kingdom

• 

  National Academy of Sciences , United States

• 

  American Physical Society , United States

• 

  Russian Academy of Sciences , Russia

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  American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

• 

  Indian National Science Academy , India

• 

  American Philosophical Society , United States

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  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

Interests

• archaeology, linguistics, natural history, ornithology

• Writers

  Herbert George Wells

Connections

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.

Father:

Arthur Isidore Gell-Mann

Mother:

Pauline Reichstein

late wife:

J. Margaret Dow

Daughter:

Elizabeth Gell-Mann

Son:

Nicholas Gell-Mann

Wife:

Marcia Southwick

Friend:

Richard Feynman

Friend:

Cormac McCarthy

References

• Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics
  2011
• Elementary Particles and the Universe: Essays in Honor of Murray Gell-Mann
  1991
• Murray Gell-Mann and the Physics of Quarks
  2018
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
  1994