Everything about Murray Gell-mann totally explained
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.
Biography
Born on New York's
Lower East Side into a family of
Jewish immigrants from
Czernowitz (External Link
), Gell-Mann quickly revealed himself as a
child prodigy. Propelled by an intense boyhood curiosity and love for nature, he entered
Yale at fifteen after graduating
valedictorian from the
Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics in 1969 for his discovery of a system for classifying subatomic particles.
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 a new
quantum number called
strangeness. Another 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.
In 1961, this led him (and
Kazuhiko Nishijima) to introduce a classification of elementary particles called
hadrons (also independently proposed by
Yuval Ne'eman at around the same time). This scheme is now explained by the
quark model. Gell-Mann's own name for the classification scheme was the
eightfold way, because of the
octets of particles in the classification. The term is a reference to the
eightfold way of Buddhism — a choice which is reflective of Gell-Mann's eclectic interests.
Gell-Mann, and, independently,
George Zweig, went on, in 1964, to postulate the existence of
quarks, the particles from which the
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 were soon accepted as the underlying elementary objects in the study of the structure of hadrons.
In 1972 he introduced with
Harald Fritzsch the quantum number 'color' and later, in a joint paper with Heinrich Leutwyler, the full theory of
quantum chromodynamics (QCD) was released as the gauge theory of strong interactions (cf. references).
The quark model is part of QCD, and has been robust enough to survive the discovery of other
flavours of quarks.
Gell-Mann and
Richard Feynman, working together, and a rival group of
George Sudarshan and
Robert Marshak, were the first to discover the vector structure of the
weak interaction in physics. This work followed the seminal discovery of
parity violation by
Chien-Shiung Wu, as suggested by
Chen-Ning Yang and
T. D. Lee.
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. The title of the book is taken from a line of an
Arthur Sze poem: "The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night."
George Johnson wrote a major biography of Gell-Mann, which is entitled
Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics.
Gell-Mann is also a collector of East Asian antiquities and a keen linguist.
Timeline
He earned a
bachelor's degree in physics from
Yale University in 1948, and a PhD in physics from
MIT in 1951.Gell-Mann was a postdoctoral research associate in 1951 and a visiting research professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagin, Illinois from 1952-1953.
After serving as Visiting Associate Professor at
Columbia University in 1954-55, he became a professor at the
University of Chicago before moving to the
California Institute of Technology, where he taught from 1955 until 1993.
He is currently the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at
Caltech as well as a University Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department of the
University of New Mexico in
Albuquerque,
New Mexico. He is a member of the editorial board of the
Encyclopædia Britannica. In 1984 Gell-Mann co-founded the
Santa Fe Institute — a non-profit research institute in
Santa Fe, New Mexico — to study complex systems and disseminate the notion of a separate interdisciplinary study of complexity theory.
Personal life
Spouse: J. Margaret Dow (m. 1955, d. 1981) and Marcia Southwick (m. 1992)
Children: Elizabeth Sarah Gell-Mann (b. 1956), Nicholas Webster Gell-Mann (b. 1963), Nicholas Southwick Levis (b. 1978), stepson
Trivia
Awards
Dannie Heineman Prize (1959)
Ernest O. Lawrence Award (1966)
Franklin Medal (1967)
John J. Carty Medal (1968)
Nobel Prize in Physics (1969)
Erice Prize (1990)Further Information
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