Murray Gell-Mann - Biography

Biography

Gell-Mann was born in lower Manhattan into a family of Jewish immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Gell-Mann quickly revealed himself as a child prodigy. Propelled by an intense boyhood curiosity and love for nature and mathematics, he graduated valedictorian from the Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School and subsequently entered Yale at the age of 15 as a member of Jonathan Edwards College. At Yale, he participated in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition and was on the team representing Yale University (along with Murray Gerstenhaber and Henry O. Pollak) that won the second prize in 1947. In 1948, Gell-Mann earned a bachelor's degree in Physics and went on to attend graduate school at MIT where he received his PhD in physics in 1951.

Gell-Mann's work in the 1950s involved recently discovered cosmic ray particles that came to be called kaons and hyperons. Classifying these particles led him to propose that a quantum number called strangeness would be conserved by the strong and the electromagnetic interactions, but not by the weak interactions. Another of Gell-Mann's ideas is the Gell-Mann-Okubo formula, which was, initially, a formula based on empirical results, but was later explained by the quark model. Gell-Mann and Abraham Pais were involved in explaining many puzzling aspects of the physics of these particles.

In 1961, this led him (and Kazuhiko Nishijima) to introduce a classification scheme for hadrons, elementary particles that participate in the strong interaction. (This scheme was independently proposed by Yuval Ne'eman.) This scheme is now explained by the quark model. Gell-Mann referred to the scheme as the Eightfold Way, because of the octets of particles in the classification. The term is a reference to the eightfold way of Buddhism.

In 1964, Gell-Mann and George Zweig, independently, went on to postulate the existence of quarks, particles of which hadrons are composed. The name was coined by Gell-Mann and is a reference to the novel Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce ("Three quarks for Muster Mark!" book 2, episode 4). Zweig had referred to the particles as "aces", but Gell-Mann's name caught on. Quarks, antiquarks, and gluons were soon accepted as the underlying elementary objects in the study of the structure of hadrons. In 1972 he and Harald Fritzsch introduced the conserved quantum number "color charge", and later along with Heinrich Leutwyler, they introduced quantum chromodynamics (QCD) as the gauge theory of the strong interaction (cf. references). The quark model is a part of QCD, and it has been robust enough to survive the discovery of new "flavors" of quarks.

Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman, working together, along with the independent duo of George Sudarshan and Robert Marshak, were the first to discover the vector and axial vector structures of the weak interaction in physics. This work followed the experimental discovery of the violation of parity by Chien-Shiung Wu, as suggested by Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee, theoretically.

During the 1990s, Gell-Mann's interest turned to the emerging study of complexity. He played a central role in the founding of the Santa Fe Institute, where he continues to work as a Distinguished Professor. He wrote a popular science book about these matters, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex. The title of the book is taken from a line of a poem by Arthur Sze: "The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night."

Gell-Mann also is an avid birdwatcher, a collector of antiquities, rancher, Along with S.A. Starostin, he established the Evolution of Human Languages project at the Santa Fe Institute.

The author George Johnson has written a biography of Gell-Mann, which is titled Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann, and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics, which Dr. Gell-Mann has criticized as inaccurate. The Nobel prize winning physicist Philip Anderson, in his chapter on Gell-Mann, says that Johnson's biography is excellent. Both Anderson and Johnson say that Gell-Mann is a perfectionist and that his semibiographical, The Quark and the Jaguar is consequently incomplete.