Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019) was an American theoretical physicist. This winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics brought order to the universe by helping discover and classify subatomic particles and their interactions. He also coined the word ‘quark’ and proposed the concept of strangeness in quarks.
Born in New York City, Gell-Mann went to Yale when he was only 15 years old and graduated in 1948. He gained his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT,) spent a year at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, and then joined the Institute for Nuclear Studies at Chicago University, where he worked with physicist Enrico Fermi.
Gell-Mann became a professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1956, then Robert Andrews Professor of Theoretical Physics (1967–93; then emeritus.) When he was 24, he contributed to the theory of elementary particles by introducing the concept of ‘strangeness,’ a new quantum number that must be conserved in any so-called ‘strong’ nuclear interaction event. Gell-Mann and Israeli theoretical physicist Yuval Ne’eman (independently) used ‘strangeness’ to group mesons, nucleons (neutrons and protons,) and hyperons. Thus they were able to form predictions in the same way Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev had about chemical elements. The omega-minus particle was predicted by this theory and observed in 1964.
Gell-Mann and George Zweig introduced the quarks, inseparable components of earth’s matter that make up protons, neutrons, and other particles. (He chose the name “quark” for a line from Irish novelist James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake) Six quarks have been predicted, named Up, Down, Strange, Charmed, Bottom, and Top.
In later years, Gell-Mann became interested in the complexity at the heart of biology, ecology, sociology, and computer science. He co-founded the Santa Fe Institute to study complex systems in 1984. He wrote a popular science book about physics and complexity science, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex (1994.)
American science journalist George Johnson wrote the biography Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th Century Physics (2000.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Murray Gell-Mann
A scientist would rather use someone else’s toothbrush than another scientist’s definitions.
—Murray Gell-Mann
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