Gell-Mann graduated from Yale with a bachelor's degree in physics in 1948 and intended to pursue graduate studies in physics. He sought to remain in the Ivy League for his graduate education and applied to Princeton University as well as Harvard University. He was rejected by Princeton and accepted by Harvard, but the latter institution was unable to offer him needed financial assistance.
He was accepted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and received a letter from Victor Weisskopf urging him to attend MIT and become Weisskopf's research assistant. This would provide Gell-Mann with the financial assistance he required. Unaware of MIT's eminent status in physics research,
Gell-Mann was "miserable" with the fact that he would not be able to
attend Princeton or Harvard and in characteristic dark irony, said he
considered suicide. Gell-Mann stated that he realized he could try to first enter MIT and commit suicide afterwards if he found it to be truly terrible. However, he couldn't first choose suicide and then attend MIT; the two "didn't commute", as Gell-Mann said.[12][13]
He received his Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 1951 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "Coupling strength and nuclear reactions", under the supervision of Weisskopf.[14][15][2]
Gell-Mann married J. Margaret Dow in 1955; they had a daughter and a son. Margaret died in 1981, and in 1992 he married Marcia Southwick, whose son became his stepson.[3]
In 1984 Gell-Mann was one of several co-founders of the Santa Fe Institute—a non-profit theoretical research institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico intended to study various aspects of a complex system and disseminate the notion of a separate interdisciplinary study of complexity theory.[31][32]
He wrote a popular science book about physics and complexity science, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex (1994).[33] 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".[34][35]
The author George Johnson has written a biography of Gell-Mann, Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann, and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics (1999),[36]
which was shortlisted for the Royal Society Book Prize.
[37]
Although Gell-Mann himself criticized Strange Beauty for some inaccuracies, with one interviewer reporting him wincing at the mention of it, the book was acclaimed by a number of his colleagues.
[38] A revised second edition was published in 2023 by the Santa Fe Institute Press with a foreword by Douglas Hofstadter.[39]
In 2012 Gell-Mann and his companion Mary McFadden published the book Mary McFadden: A Lifetime of Design, Collecting, and Adventure.[40]
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 interaction.[43] 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 his quark model.[44] Gell-Mann and Abraham Pais were involved in explaining this puzzling aspect of the neutral kaon mixing.[45]
Murray Gell-Mann's fortunate encounter with mathematician Richard Earl Block at Caltech, in the fall of 1960, "enlightened" him to introduce a novel classification scheme, in 1961, for hadrons.[46][47] A similar scheme had been independently proposed by Yuval Ne'eman, and has come to be explained by the quark model.[48] 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 Path of Buddhism).[3][15]
Gell-Mann, along with Maurice Lévy, developed the sigma model of pions, which describes low-energy pion interactions.[49]
In 1964, Gell-Mann and, independently, George Zweig went on to postulate the existence of quarks, particles which make up the hadrons of this scheme. The name "quark" 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",[50] but Gell-Mann's name caught on. Quarks, antiquarks, and gluons were soon established as the underlying elementary objects in the study of the structure of hadrons. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969 for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions.[51]
In the 1960s, he introduced current algebra as a method of systematically exploiting symmetries to extract predictions from quark models, in the absence of reliable dynamical theory. This method led to model-independent sum rules confirmed by experiment, and provided starting points underpinning the development of the Standard Model (SM), the widely accepted theory of elementary particles.[52][53]
In 1972 Gell-Mann, while on sabbatical leave to CERN, together with Harald Fritzsch, Heinrich Leutwyler and William A. Bardeen, considered a Yang-Mills theory of "quark color," and coined the term quantum chromodynamics (QCD) as the gauge theory of the strong interaction.[54] The quark model is a part of QCD, and it has been robust enough to accommodate in a natural fashion the discovery of new "flavors" of quarks, which has superseded the eightfold way scheme.[55]
^ abcdefJohnson, George (May 24, 2019). "Murray Gell-Mann, Who Peered at Particles and Saw the Universe, Dies at 89". Obituaries. The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on May 25, 2019. Retrieved May 24, 2019.
^Hill, Christopher T. (2020). "Murray Gell-Mann". Physics Today. 73 (5): 63. Bibcode:2020PhT....73e..63H. doi:10.1063/PT.3.4480.
^"Caltech Mourns the Passing of Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019)". California Institute of Technology. May 24, 2019. Archived from the original on April 19, 2021. Retrieved May 25, 2019.
^Carroll, Sean (May 28, 2019). "The Physicist Who Made Sense of the Universe - Murray Gell-Mann's discoveries illuminated the most puzzling aspects of nature, and changed science forever". The New York Times. Archived from the original on July 16, 2023. Retrieved May 28, 2019.
^M. Gell-Mann (October 1997). "My Father". Web of Stories. Archived from the original on August 29, 2012. Retrieved October 1, 2010.
^J. Brockman (2003). "The Making of a Physicist: A talk with Murray Gell-Mann". Edge Foundation, Inc. Archived from the original on May 17, 2021. Retrieved October 1, 2010.
^Profile Archived June 1, 2021, at the Wayback Machine, NNDB; accessed April 26, 2015.
^"Notable Alumni". Jonathan Edwards College. Archived from the original on May 27, 2019. Retrieved May 27, 2019.
^Murray Gell-Mann - MIT or suicide (17/200), archived from the original on December 11, 2021, retrieved June 6, 2020
^Strogatz, Steven (2013). The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity. Mariner Books. p. 27. ISBN 978-0544105850.
^Gell-Mann, Murray (1951). Coupling strength and nuclear reactions (Thesis thesis). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. hdl:1721.1/12195. Archived from the original on January 28, 2023. Retrieved June 6, 2020.
^ ab"Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Prize-winning physicist who named quarks, dies at 89". The Guardian. May 26, 2019. Archived from the original on August 4, 2020. Retrieved May 27, 2019.
^"Interview with Murray Gell-Mann [Oral History]". Caltech Institute Archives. Archived from the original on February 21, 2024. Retrieved May 25, 2019.
^Glashow, Sheldon Lee (July 2019). "In Memoriam. Murray Gell-Mann". Inference. 4 (4). doi:10.37282/991819.19.42. S2CID 241304235. Archived from the original on February 3, 2024. Retrieved November 8, 2023.
^"Jeffrey Epstein to Host Mindshift Conference". Archived from the original on November 11, 2010. Retrieved June 1, 2024.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
^Masters, Kim (September 18, 2019). "The Strange Saga of Jeffrey Epstein's Link to a Child Star Turned Cryptocurrency Mogul". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved July 12, 2024.
^ abcd"Murray Gell-Mann – Biographical". The Nobel Prize. Archived from the original on December 9, 2023. Retrieved May 25, 2019.
^ abMarshall, Jenna (May 24, 2019). "Murray Gell-Mann passes away at 89". Santa Fe Institute (Press release). Archived from the original on November 2, 2023. Retrieved May 24, 2019.
^Peregrine, Peter Neal (2009). Ancient Human Migrations: A Multidisciplinary Approach. The University of Utah Press. p. ix. ISBN 978-0-87480-942-8. Sergei Starostin and I established the Evolution of Human Languages project
^The International Academy of Humanism Archived April 24, 2008, at the Wayback Machine at the website of the Council for Secular Humanism. Retrieved October 18, 2007. Some of this information is also at the International Humanist and Ethical Union Archived April 18, 2012, at the Wayback Machine website
^Herman Wouk (2010). The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion. Hachette Digital, Inc. ISBN 9780316096751. Feynman, Gell-Mann, Weinberg, and their peers accept Newton's incomparable stature and shrug off his piety, on the kindly thought that the old man got into the game too early. ... As for Gell-Mann, he seems to see nothing to discuss in this entire God business, and in the index to The Quark and the Jaguar God goes unmentioned. Life he called a "complex adaptive system", which produces interesting phenomena such as the jaguar and Murray Gell-Mann, who discovered the quark. Gell-Mann is a Nobel-class tackler of problems, but for him the existence of God is not one of them.
^Dombey, Norman (June 2, 2019). "Murray Gell-Mann obituary". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on May 23, 2024. Retrieved June 6, 2019.
^"Nobel Prize Winner Appointed Presidential Professor at USC". Archived from the original on September 19, 2010.
^Gell-Mann, M. (1972). "Quarks". Elementary Particle Physics. Springer. pp. 733–761. doi:10.1007/978-3-7091-4034-5_20. ISBN 978-3-7091-4036-9.
Mermin, N. David. "A "Virtuosically Adaptive" System as Seen by a "Marginally Adaptive" One". Physics Today. 47 (9): 89. doi:10.1063/1.2808634.
^"Murray Gell-Mann – Physicist – The decision to write "The Quark and the Jaguar" – Web of Stories". Archived from the original on August 5, 2020. Retrieved July 17, 2020.
^"Murray Gell-Mann - The decision to write "The Quark and the Jaguar" (190/200)". YouTube. May 11, 2016. Archived from the original on December 11, 2021. Retrieved July 17, 2020.
^Johnson, George. "Strange Beauty". Talaya.net. Archived from the original on May 8, 2019. Retrieved June 3, 2019.[unreliable source?]
^Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize winners list at docs.google.com/spreadsheets Archived October 23, 2019, at the Wayback Machine Retrieved February 15, 2017
^Rodgers, Peter (June 1, 2003). "The many worlds of Murray Gell-Mann". Physics World. Archived from the original on November 2, 2023. Retrieved May 26, 2019.
In a review in the Caltech magazine Engineering & Science, Gell-Mann's colleague, the physicist David Goodstein, wrote: "I don't envy Murray the weird experience of reading so penetrating and perceptive a biography of himself. George Johnson has written a fine biography of this important and complex man". Goodstein, David L. (1999). "Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics". Engineering and Science. 62 (4). Caltech. ISSN 0013-7812. Archived from the original on May 29, 2019. Retrieved June 3, 2019..
Physicist and Nobel laureate Philip Anderson, called the book "a masterpiece of scientific explication for the layman" and a "must read" in a review for the Times Higher Education Supplement and in his chapter on Gell-Mann from a 2011 book.Anderson, Philip W. (2011). "Ch. V Genius. Search for Polymath's Elementary Particles". More and Different: Notes from a Thoughtful Curmudgeon. World Scientific. pp. 241–2. ISBN 978-981-4350-14-3. Philip Anderson, More and Different, Chapter V, World Scientific, 2011. Sheldon Glashow, another Nobel laureate, gave Strange Beauty a generally positive review while noting some inaccuracies, Glashow, Sheldon Lee (2000). "Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics". American Journal of Physics. 68 (6): 582. Bibcode:2000AmJPh..68..582J. doi:10.1119/1.19489.
and physicist and science historian Silvan S. Schweber called the book "an elegant biography of one of the outstanding theorists of the twentieth century" though he noted that Johnson did not go into depth about Gell-Mann's work with military–industrial organizations like the Institute for Defense Analyses. Schweber, Silvan S. (2000). "Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics". Physics Today. 53 (8): 43–44. Bibcode:2000PhT....53h..43J. doi:10.1063/1.1310122.
Johnson has written that Gell-Mann was a perfectionist and that The Quark and the Jaguar was consequently submitted late and incomplete.Johnson, George (July 1, 2000). "The Jaguar and the Fox". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on May 5, 2019. Retrieved May 27, 2019. In an item on Edge.org, Johnson described the back story of his relationship with Gell-Mann West, Geoffrey (May 28, 2019). "Remembering Murray". Edge Foundation, Inc. Archived from the original on May 28, 2019. Retrieved June 3, 2019. and noted that an errata sheet appears on the biography's webpage. Johnson, George. "Errata". Talaya.net. Archived from the original on May 28, 2019. Retrieved June 3, 2019..
Gell-Mann's one-time Caltech associate Stephen Wolfram called Johnson's book "a very good biography of Murray, which Murray hated". name=wolfram>Stephen Wolfram, Remembering Murray Gell-Mann (1929-2019), Inventor of Quarks Archived June 1, 2019, at the Wayback Machine Wolfram also wrote that Gell-Mann thought the writing of The Quark and the Jaguar to be responsible for a heart attack he (Gell-Mann) had had.
^"Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann & the Revolution in Physics". SFI Press. Archived from the original on November 26, 2023. Retrieved November 26, 2023.
^Mary McFadden; Murray Gell-Mann (2012). Mary McFadden: A Lifetime of Design, Collecting, and Adventure. Random House Incorporated. ISBN 978-0-8478-3656-7.
^Sudarshan, E. C. G.; Marshak, R. E. (June 1, 2016). "Origin of the Universal V-A theory". AIP Conference Proceedings. 300 (1): 110–124. doi:10.1063/1.45454. hdl:2152/29431. ISSN 0094-243X. S2CID 10153816.
^Gell-Mann, M. (1956). "The Interpretation of the New Particles as Displaced Charge Multiplets". Il Nuovo Cimento. 4 (supplement 2): 848–866. Bibcode:1956NCim....4S.848G. doi:10.1007/BF02748000. S2CID 121017243.
^Georgi, Howard (1999). Lie Algebras in Particle Physics: from Isospin to Unified Theories (2nd ed.). Perseus Books. ISBN 9780738202334. OCLC 479362196.
^Squires, Gordon Leslie (July 26, 1999). "Quantum mechanics – Applications of quantum mechanics – Decay of the Kaon". Encyclopedia Britannica. Archived from the original on March 28, 2023. Retrieved May 27, 2019.
^Gell-Mann, M. (March 15, 1961). The Eightfold Way: A Theory of Strong Interaction Symmetry (Report). Pasadena, CA: California Inst. of Tech., Synchrotron Laboratory. doi:10.2172/4008239. TID-12608. Archived from the original on March 9, 2020. Retrieved May 25, 2019 – via OSTI.GOV.
^Murray Gell-Mann - Sheldon Glashow. The SU(2) times U1 theory: Part 2 (91/200). Web of Stories. May 19, 2016. Archived from the original on December 11, 2021. Retrieved June 3, 2019 – via YouTube.
^Ne'eman, Y. (August 1961). "Derivation of Strong Interactions from a Gauge Invariance". Nuclear Physics. 26 (2). Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co.: 222–229. Bibcode:1961NucPh..26..222N. doi:10.1016/0029-5582(61)90134-1.
^Gell-Mann, M.; Lévy, M. (1960). "The axial vector current in beta decay". Il Nuovo Cimento. 16 (4): 705–726. Bibcode:1960NCim...16..705G. doi:10.1007/BF02859738. S2CID 122945049.
^G. Zweig (1980) [1964]. "An SU(3) model for strong interaction symmetry and its breaking II". In D. Lichtenberg; S. Rosen (eds.). Developments in the Quark Theory of Hadrons. Vol. 1. Hadronic Press. pp. 22–101.
^Simple listing of Nobel Prize in Physics, 1969 Archived July 13, 2012, at the Wayback Machine Retrieved February 15, 2017
^Ellis, John (2011). "Prospects for New Physics at the LHC". In Fritzsch, Harald; Phua, K. K.; Baaquie, B. E. (eds.). Proceedings of the Conference in Honour of Murray Gell-Mann's 80th Birthday: Quantum Mechanics, Elementary Particles, Quantum Cosmology and Complexity : Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, February 24–26, 2010. World Scientific. ISBN 9789814335607.
^Cao, Tian Yu (2010). From Current Algebra to Quantum Chromodynamics: A Case for Structural Realism. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781139491600.
^Fritzsch, H.; Gell-Mann, M.; Leutwyler, H. (1973). "Advantages of the color octet gluon picture". Physics Letters. 47B (4): 365–368. Bibcode:1973PhLB...47..365F. CiteSeerX10.1.1.453.4712. doi:10.1016/0370-2693(73)90625-4.
^M. Gell-Mann, P. Ramond and R. Slansky, in Supergravity, ed. by D. Freedman and P. Van Nieuwenhuizen, North Holland, Amsterdam (1979), pp. 315–321. ISBN 044485438X
^Rickles, Dean (2014). A Brief History of String Theory: From Dual Models to M-Theory. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 9783642451287. OCLC 968779591.
^ abSiegfried, Tom (May 24, 2019). "Murray Gell-Mann gave structure to the subatomic world". Science News. Archived from the original on May 25, 2019. Retrieved May 26, 2019.
^"1959 Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics Recipient". American Physical Society. Archived from the original on February 3, 2007. Retrieved May 25, 2019. For his contributions to field theory and to the theory of elementary particles.
^Gell-Mann listing at member-directory of nasonline.org Archived March 24, 2019, at the Wayback Machine Retrieved February 15, 2017
^"Murray Gell-Mann, Ph.D. Biography and Interview". Academy of Achievement. American Academy of Achievement. Archived from the original on February 16, 2024. Retrieved April 17, 2019.
^"Murray Gell-Mann". amacad.org. February 9, 2023. Archived from the original on November 3, 2023. Retrieved June 6, 2020.
^"Murray Gell-Mann 1966". US Department of Energy, Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award. May 3, 2016. Archived from the original on May 22, 2017. Retrieved May 25, 2019. For his contributions of the highest significance to the theory of elementary and theoretical work in the field of physics.
^"Murray Gell-Mann, Physics (1967)". The Franklin Institute. January 15, 2014. Archived from the original on February 23, 2021. Retrieved May 25, 2019.
^"John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science". National Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on December 29, 2010. Retrieved March 7, 2011.
^"Murray Gell-Mann". Global 500 Environmental Forum. Archived from the original on May 25, 2019. Retrieved May 25, 2019.
^"APS Member History". Archived from the original on March 15, 2022. Retrieved March 15, 2022.
^"Albert Einstein Medal". Einstein Society | Einsteinhaus Bern. Archived from the original on January 24, 2019. Retrieved May 25, 2019.
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^Press Release, 10–2014, from Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften Archived May 25, 2019, at the Wayback Machine Retrieved February 15, 2017
Further reading
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Encyclopædia Britannica biography of Murray Gell-Mann Archived July 26, 2020, at the Wayback Machine
Fritzsch, H.; Gell-Mann, M.; Leutwyler, H. (November 26, 1973). "Advantages of the color octet gluon picture". Physics Letters B. 47 (4): 365–8. Bibcode:1973PhLB...47..365F. CiteSeerX10.1.1.453.4712. doi:10.1016/0370-2693(73)90625-4.
Fritzsch, H.; Gell-Mann, M. (1972). "Current algebra- quarks and what else?". In Jackson, J.D.; Roberts, A.; International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (eds.). Proceedings of the XVI International Conference on High Energy Physics. Vol. 2. National Accelerator Laboratory. pp. 135–165. OCLC 57672574.
Murray Gell-Mann tells his life story at Web of Stories[permanent dead link]
Johnson, George (October 1999). Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th Century Physics (1st ed.). Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-679-43764-2.
The Making of a Physicist: A Talk With Murray Gell-Mann Archived May 17, 2021, at the Wayback Machine
Berreby, D. (May 8, 1994). "The Man Who Knows Everything". New York Times. Archived from the original on October 25, 2007. Retrieved February 11, 2017.
The Man With Five Brains
The Simple and the Complex, Part I: The Quantum and the Quasi-Classical with Murray Gell-Mann, Ph.D. Archived June 4, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
Interview of Murray Gell-Mann by Lillian Hoddeson on 1982 July 27, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA, www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/32880 Archived October 31, 2022, at the Wayback Machine Retrieved 2023-06-20.
Interview of Murray Gell-Mann by Finn Aaserud on 1987 April 23, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA, www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/31110 Archived February 4, 2023, at the Wayback Machine Retrieved 2023-06-20.
Interview of Murray Gell-Mann by Dan Ford on 2017 January 15, Audio and video interviews about the life and work of Richard Garwin, 2004-2012 Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA, www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/40912-9 Archived December 4, 2022, at the Wayback Machine Retrieved 2023-06-20.
External links
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