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]
Murray Gell-Mann in Nice, 2012
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 PathofBuddhism).[3][15]
Gell-Mann, along with Maurice Lévy, developed the sigma modelofpions, 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]
^Herman Wouk (2010). The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion. Hachette Digital, Inc. ISBN9780316096751. 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.
^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. ISSN0013-7812. 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. ISBN978-981-4350-14-3. 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 QuarksArchived 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.
^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. ISBN9789814335607.
^Cao, Tian Yu (2010). From Current Algebra to Quantum Chromodynamics: A Case for Structural Realism. Cambridge University Press. ISBN9781139491600.
^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. ISBN044485438X
^Rickles, Dean (2014). A Brief History of String Theory: From Dual Models to M-Theory. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN9783642451287. OCLC968779591.
^"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.
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. OCLC57672574.
