Murray Gell-Mann

Murray Gell-Mann (born September 15, 1929) is an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. Born on New York's Lower East Side, Gell-Mann quickly revealed himself as a child prodigy. Propelled by an intense boyhood curiosity and love for nature, he entered Yale at fifteen. By age twenty-three he had ignited a revolution, laying bare in his groundbreaking work the strange beauty of the minute particles that make up reality http://www.santafe.edu/~johnson/strangebeauty.html.

Related Topics:
September 15 - 1929 - American - Physicist - 1969 - Nobel Prize in physics - Elementary particle - Child prodigy - Yale

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Gell-Mann's work in the 1950s involved the understanding of a class of then newly discovered elementary particles which came to be called kaons and hyperons. Classifying these particles led to the idea of a new quantum number called strangeness. One of Gell-Mann's triumphs is the Gell-mann-Nishijima formula, which was, initially, a formula from 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.

Related Topics:
1950s - Elementary particles - Kaon - Hyperon - Quantum number - Strangeness - Gell-mann-Nishijima formula - Abraham Pais

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In 1961, this led him (and Kazuhiko Nishijima) to introduce a classification of elementary particles called hadrons. This scheme is now explained by the quark model. Gell-Mann's own name for the classifcation scheme was the eightfold way, because of the octets of particles in the classification, and also after the eightfold way of buddhism— a choice that is reflective of Gell-Mann's interests.

Related Topics:
1961 - Kazuhiko Nishijima - Hadron - Quark model - Eightfold way - Buddhism

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Gell-Mann, and, independently, George Zweig, then went on, in 1964, to postulate the quark model. This introduced quarks, the particles of which the hadrons were composed, a name coined by Gell-Mann through a reference to the book Finnegans Wake, written by James Joyce. Zweig had referred to the particles as "aces" but Gell-Mann's name caught on.

Related Topics:
George Zweig - Quark - Hadron - Finnegans Wake - James Joyce

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Quarks were soon accepted to be the underlying elementary objects in the study of the structure of hadrons. The modern theory of the interactions of quarks is called quantum chromodynamics (QCD), and is based on Gell-Mann's work. The quark model is part of QCD, and has been robust enough to survive the discovery of other flavours of quarks.

Related Topics:
Quantum chromodynamics - Flavour

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Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman working together, and a rival group of George Sudarshan and Richard Marshak, were the first to find the structure of the weak interaction in physics. This work followed the seminal discovery of parity violation by Wu, as suggested by Chen-Ning Yang and T. D. Lee.

Related Topics:
Richard Feynman - George Sudarshan - Richard Marshak - Weak interaction - Parity violation - Wu - Chen-Ning Yang - T. D. Lee

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Gell-Mann continued to be active in physics. In the 1990s his interest turned to the emerging study of complexity, where he was closely associated with the Santa Fe Institute. He wrote a popular science book about these matters, The Quark and the Jaguar, Adventures in the Simple and the Complex.

Related Topics:
1990s - Complexity - Santa Fe Institute

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George Johnson wrote a major biography of Gell-Mann, which is entitled Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics.

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Murray Gell-Mann is also a collector of East Asian antiquities and a keen linguist.

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