Murray Gell-Mann

Murray Gell-Mann
Murray Gell-Mann lecturing at TED in 2007
Born	September 15, 1929 (1929-09-15) (age 82) Manhattan, New York City, U.S.
Residence	United States
Nationality	American
Fields	Physics
Institutions	Santa Fe Institute University of New Mexico University of Southern California California Institute of Technology
Alma mater	Yale University, MIT
Doctoral advisor	Victor Weisskopf
Doctoral students	Kenneth G. Wilson Sidney Coleman Rod Crewther James Hartle Christopher T. Hill H. Jay Melosh Barton Zwiebach Kenneth Young Todd Brun[1]
Known for	Elementary particles Gell-Mann matrices Gell-Mann–Nishijima formula Gell-Mann–Okubo mass formula Effective complexity
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Physics (1969)

Murray Gell-Mann ( /ˈmʌriː ˈɡɛl ˈmæn/; born September 15, 1929) is an American physicist and linguist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He is the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at Caltech, a Distinguished Fellow and co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department of the University of New Mexico, and the Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine at the University of Southern California.^[2]

He formulated the quark model of hadronic resonances, and identified the SU(3) flavor symmetry of the light quarks, extending isospin to include strangeness, which he also discovered. He developed the V-A theory of the weak interaction in collaboration with Richard Feynman. He created current algebra in the 1960s as a way of extracting predictions from quark models when the fundamental theory was still murky, which led to model-independent sum rules confirmed by experiment.

Gell-Mann, along with Maurice Lévy, developed the sigma model of pions, which describes low energy pion interactions. Modifying the integer-charged quark model of Han and Nambu, Fritzsch and Gell-Mann were the first to write down the modern accepted theory of quantum chromodynamics, although they did not anticipate asymptotic freedom. In 1969 he received the Nobel Prize in physics for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions.^[3]

Gell-Mann is responsible for the see-saw theory of neutrino masses, that produces masses at the inverse-GUT scale in any theory with a right-handed neutrino, like the SO(10) model. He is also known to have played a large role in keeping string theory alive through the 1970s and early 1980s, supporting that line of research at a time when it was unpopular.

Biography

Gell-Mann was born in lower Manhattan into a family of Jewish immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire,^[4][5] Gell-Mann quickly revealed himself as a child prodigy. Propelled by an intense boyhood curiosity and love for nature and mathematics, he graduated valedictorian from the Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School and subsequently entered Yale at the age of 15 as a member of Jonathan Edwards College.

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 elementary interactions, but not by the weak interactions. 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 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 scheme for hadrons, elementary particles that participate in the strong interaction. (This scheme was independently proposed by Yuval Ne'eman.) This scheme is now explained by the quark model. 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 way of Buddhism.

In 1964, Gell-Mann and George Zweig, independently, went on to postulate the existence of quarks, particles of which 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",^[6] but Gell-Mann's name caught on. Quarks, antiquarks, and gluons were soon accepted as the underlying elementary objects in the study of the structure of hadrons. In 1972 he and Harald Fritzsch introduced the conserved quantum number "color charge", and later along with Heinrich Leutwyler, they introduced quantum chromodynamics (QCD) as the gauge theory of the strong interaction (cf. references). The quark model is a part of QCD, and it has been robust enough to survive the discovery of new "flavors" of quarks.

Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman, working together, along with the independent duo of George Sudarshan and Robert Marshak, were the first to discover the vector and axial vector structures of the weak interaction in physics. This work followed the experimental discovery of the violation of parity by Chien-Shiung Wu, as suggested by Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee, theoretically.

During the 1990s, Gell-Mann's interest turned to the emerging study of complexity. He played a central role in the founding of the Santa Fe Institute, where he continues to work as a Distinguished Professor. 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 a poem by Arthur Sze: "The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night."

Gell-Mann also is an avid birdwatcher, a collector of antiquities, and a gifted linguist. He notably assisted S.A. Starostin in his reconstruction of the Proto-Human language.

The author George Johnson has written a biography of Gell-Mann, which is titled Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann, and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics, which Dr. Gell-Mann has criticized as inaccurate.

Timeline

Gell-Mann earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Yale University in 1948, and a PhD in physics from MIT in 1951. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1951, and a visiting research professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from 1952 to 1953. He was a visiting associate professor at Columbia University and an associate professor at the University of Chicago in 1954-55 before moving to the California Institute of Technology, where he taught from 1955 until he retired in 1993. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics in 1969 for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions.^[7]

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 and the Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine at the University of Southern California. 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 theoretical 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

Gell-Mann married Marcia Southwick in 1992, after the death of his first wife, J. Margaret Dow (d. 1981), whom he married in 1955. His children are Elizabeth Sarah Gell-Mann (b. 1956) and Nicholas Webster Gell-Mann (b. 1963); and he has a stepson, Nicholas Southwick Levis (b. 1978).

Awards and honors

• Nobel Prize in Physics (1969)
• Ernest O. Lawrence Award (1966)
• Academy of Achievement Golden Plate Award (1962)
• Albert Einstein Medal (2005)
• Yale University — D.Sc (h.c.), 1959
• American Physical Society — Dannie Heineman Prize, 1959
• University of Chicago — Sc.D.(h.c.), 1967
• Franklin Medal, 1967
• National Academy of Sciences — John J. Carty Award, 1968^[8]
• University of Illinois — Sc.D.(h.c.), 1968
• Wesleyan University — Sc.D.(h.c.), 1968
• Research Corporation Award, 1969
• University of Turin, Italy — Honorary Doctorate, 1969
• University of Utah — Sc.D.(h.c.), 1970
• Columbia University — Sc.D.(h.c.), 1977
• University of Cambridge, England — Sc.D.(h.c.), 1980
• United Nations Environment Programme Roll of Honor for Environmental Achievement (The Global 500), 1988
• World Federation of Scientists — Erice Prize, 1990
• University of Oxford, England — D.Sc.(h.c.), 1992
• Southern Illinois University — Sc.D.(h.c.), 1993
• University of Florida — Sc.D.(h.c.), Doctorate of Natural Resources, 1994
• Southern Methodist University — Sc.D.(h.c.), 1999
• American Humanist Association - Humanist of the Year, 2005

See also

• List of Jewish Nobel laureates
• Quark
• Gell-Mann matrices

Notes

1. ^ T. A. Brun (2009). "Applications of the decoherence formalism". PhD Thesis. California Institute of Technology. http://en.scientificcommons.org/43071322. Retrieved 2010-10-01. 
2. ^ "Nobel Prize Winner Appointed Presidential Professor at USC". http://uscnews.usc.edu/university/nobel_prize_winner_appointed_presidential_professor_at_usc.html. 
3. ^ http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1969/gell-mann-bio.html
4. ^ M. Gell-Mann (October 1997). "My Father". Web of Stories. http://www.webofstories.com/play/10555. Retrieved 2010-10-01. 
5. ^ J. Brockman (2003). "The Making of a Physicist: A talk with Murray Gell-Mann". Edge.org. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gell-mann03/gell-mann_print.html. Retrieved 2010-10-01. 
6. ^ G. Zweig (1980) [1964]. "An SU(3) model for strong interaction symmetry and its breaking II". In D. Lichtenberg and S. Rosen. Developments in the Quark Theory of Hadrons. 1. Hadronic Press. pp. 22–101. http://cdsweb.cern.ch/search.py?recid=570209&ln=en. 
7. ^ [1] Nobel Prize in Physics, 1969
8. ^ "John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science". National Academy of Sciences. http://www.nasonline.org/site/PageServer?pagename=AWARDS_carty. Retrieved 7 March 2011. 

References and further reading

• Biography and Bibliographic Resources, from the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, United States Department of Energy
• Encyclopaedia Britannica's Biography of Murray Gell-Mann
• Fritzsch, Gell-Mann, Leutwyler "Advantages of the color octet gluon picture", Physics Letters B 47, 1973, p. 365; Fritzsch, Gell-Mann "Current algebra- quarks and what else?", 16. International Conference High energy physics, Cern 1972, vol.2, p. 135
• Murray Gell-Mann Home page at Santa Fe Institute
• Murray Gell-Mann tells his life story at Web of Stories
• Strange Beauty home page
• TedTalks March 2007: Beauty and truth in physics
• The Making of a Physicist: A Talk With Murray Gell-Mann
• The Man Who Knows Everything, David Berreby, New York Times, May 8, 1994
• The Man With Five Brains
• The many worlds of Murray Gell-Mann
• The Simple and the Complex, Part I: The Quantum and the Quasi-Classical with Murray Gell-Mann, Ph.D.
• Nobel Prize Biography

External links

• Biography and Bibliographic Resources, from the Department of Energy, Office of Scientific & Technical Information
• Gell-Mann's Home Page at SFI
• TED Talks: Murray Gell-Mann on beauty and truth in physics at TED in 2007
• TED Talks: Murray Gell-Mann on the ancestor of language at TED
• Murray Gell-Mann Video Interview with the Academy of Achievement in 1990

Persondata
Name	Gell-Mann, Murray
Alternative names
Short description	Physicist
Date of birth	September 15, 1929
Place of birth	Manhattan, New York City, U.S.
Date of death
Place of death