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Murray Gell-Mann
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:
Murray Gell-Mann |
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Houghton Mifflin Guide to Science & Technology:
Murray Gell-Mann |
 | Murray Gell-Mann |
| NARA/Ca. Inst. of Tech. |
[b. New York City, September 15, 1929]
The development of the concept of strangeness for particles when he was 24, which explained why particles in cosmic rays did not decay according to previous theories, showed two characteristics of Gell-Mann's later work: truly innovative ideas in particle physics and a penchant for unusual names for his discoveries. His next triumph, the classification scheme for baryons (heavy subatomic particles), was termed the eightfold way. His most famous name and discovery is quarks for the fundamental particles underlying all medium and heavy particles. Less well known is his work on neutral currents, a manifestation of the weak force.
Gale Encyclopedia of Biography:
Murray Gell-Mann |
The American physicist Murray Gell-Mann (born 1929) coined the definition "quarks" to describe the triplets of particles that form the cores of atoms. The Nobel Prize winner for Physics in 1969, he helped to develop the Stanford model, which describes the behavior of subatomic particles and their forces.
Murray Gell-Mann was born on September 15, 1929, in New York City of Austrian immigrant parents. A precocious child, he attended a special school for gifted children, where he took a physics course. "It was the dullest course I've ever taken," he told Omni magazine in 1985, "and the only course I've ever done badly in!"
Early Academic Career
Gell-Mann graduated from school at the age of 15 and entered Yale University, where he sailed through a bachelor's degree to earn his diploma in 1948. Next came graduate study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he claims to have found out, for the very first time, what true scientific research can achieve. Totally committed to his work, he completed his doctorate in 1951, and proceeded to the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, where he had been awarded a research grant.
Gell-Mann's first academic appointment was in 1952 with the Institute for Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago, where he started the work on elementary particles that was to bring him the Nobel Prize in physics in 1969. In 1955 he moved to the California Institute of Technology (CalTech). A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Gell-Mann was the recipient of the Dannie Heineman Prize of the American Physical Society in 1959 and of numerous special lectureships and honors.
Order out of Chaos
Gell-Mann was one of the young physicists of the 1950s who tried to bring order into the chaotic field of elementary particles. In 1953 he proposed the invariant quality of "strangeness" to explain the behavior of some of the elementary particles. This quality, he noted, was conserved in strong and electromagnetic interactions but not in weak interactions. Strangeness proved useful in ordering the particles to form a classification chart somewhat analogous to the periodic table of elements. The chart not only listed families of particles, but by means of it Gell-Mann was able to predict the existence of a hitherto unknown particle, omega-minus, which was detected in 1964.
Physicists began using the term "strange particles" to describe a group of particles, inclusive for K-mesons and hyperons, that exhibited several peculiarities. To explain the anomalously long lifetimes of these particles, Gell-Mann advanced the theory of "associated production": the strong forces responsible for strange particles could act to create them only in batches of more than one at a time. Using his strangeness formulations, Gell-Mann also gave descriptions in detail of numerous decay events of strange particles, as well as prophesying the existence of the neutral xi particle.
In his continuing search for a more general elementary particle theory, Gell-Mann introduced a hypothetical particle, the quark, which is viewed as the fundamental stable constituent of the other particles and therefore is possibly the ultimate building block in the physical universe. Although quarks were not known to exist in the early 1960s when he began to work on particle physics, by the mid-1990s six types, forming three pairs, had been positively identified, and Gell-Mann does not rule out the possibility that there may be many more waiting for discovery.
During the Cold War years, Gell-Mann's work on particle physics was useful to the U.S. defense industries and the military. Notable among his assignments was his antisubmarine work for the Rand Corporation, and his service as a consultant to the Institute for Defense Analysis, especially with regard to the detection of nuclear test detonations.
His formal place of employment, however, was the University of Chicago, where he remained until 1955. The following year he took a professorship at CalTech.
A settled home on the coveted west coast notwithstanding, Gell-Mann left California in 1993 to work at the Santa Fe Institute - an institution he co-founded in 1984 - to focus on complex adaptive systems, an interdisciplinary field.
Gell-Mann has written and co-authored many papers. His longer works include: The Discovery of Subatomic Particles, (1983) and The Quark and the Jaguar.
A Man of Many Interests
A man of wide interests, Gell-Mann speaks 13 languages fluently, is an accomplished ornithologist, and is very knowledgeable about the archeology of the Southwestern United States. A passionate conservationist, he helped to establish a nonprofit organization called the World Resources Institute.
Further Reading
Information on Murray Gell-Man can be found in Omni (May, 1985) and The Scientific Life (1962), contains an interesting interview with Gell-Mann. For background information on elementary particle physics see David Park, Contemporary Physics (1964).
Columbia Encyclopedia:
Murray Gell-Mann |
Gell-Mann, Murray (gĕl'-män), 1929-, American theoretical physicist, b. New York City, grad. Yale 1948, Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1951. In 1953, he and the Japanese team of T. Nakano and Kazuhiko Nishijima independently proposed the concept of "strangeness" to account for certain particle-decay patterns; strangeness became the foundation for later symmetry studies. In 1961, Gell-Mann and Israeli physicist Yuval Ne'eman independently introduced the "eightfold way," or SU(3) symmetry, a tablelike ordering of all subatomic particles analogous to the ordering of the elements in the periodic table. The 1964 discovery of the omega-minus particle, which filled a gap in this ordering, brought the theory wide acceptance and led to Gell-Mann's being awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize for Physics. In 1963, Gell-Mann and American physicist George Zweig independently postulated the existence of the quark, an even more fundamental elementary particle with a fractional electric charge; quarks are confined in protons, neutrons, and other particles by forces associated with the exchange of gluons. Gell-Mann and others later constructed the quantum field theory of quarks and gluons called quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Gell-Mann's interests have extended to the study of complexity, and he is the director of physics at the Santa Fe Institute, which he helped found in 1984. He has written The Eightfold Way in collaboration with Ne'eman (1964), Broken Scale Invariance and the Light Cone with Kenneth G. Wilson (1971), and The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and Complex (1984).
Bibliography
See biography by G. Johnson (1999).
Wikipedia on Answers.com:
Murray Gell-Mann |
| Murray Gell-Mann | |
|---|---|
 Murray Gell-Mann at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, 2012 |
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| Born | September 15, 1929 Manhattan, New York City, U.S. |
| Residence |  United States |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions | Santa Fe Institute University of New Mexico University of Southern California California Institute of Technology |
| Alma mater | Yale University (B.S.) MIT (Ph.D.) |
| Doctoral advisor | Victor Weisskopf |
| Doctoral students |
Kenneth G. Wilson 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.
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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. At Yale, he participated in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition and was on the team representing Yale University (along with Murray Gerstenhaber and Henry O. Pollak) that won the second prize in 1947. In 1948, Gell-Mann earned a bachelor's degree in Physics and went on to attend graduate school at MIT where he received his PhD in physics in 1951.
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
Notes
- ^ T. A. Brun (2009). "Applications of the decoherence formalism". PhD Thesis. California Institute of Technology. http://en.scientificcommons.org/43071322. Retrieved 2010-10-01.
- ^ "Nobel Prize Winner Appointed Presidential Professor at USC". http://uscnews.usc.edu/university/nobel_prize_winner_appointed_presidential_professor_at_usc.html.
- ^ http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1969/gell-mann-bio.html
- ^ M. Gell-Mann (October 1997). "My Father". Web of Stories. http://www.webofstories.com/play/10555. Retrieved 2010-10-01.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ [1] Nobel Prize in Physics, 1969
- ^ "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
- Encyclopædia 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
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Murray Gell-Mann |
- 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
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 | Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 1994-2012 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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