GELL-MANN, MURRAY

GELL-MANN, MURRAY (1929– ), U.S. theoretical physicist. Born in New York City and educated at Yale, which he entered at the age of 15 (B.S. 1948), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D. 1951), Gell-Mann studied physics rather than the languages and archaeology he originally preferred, because his father, who ran a language school, warned him that he would never be able to make a living. Gell-Mann taught at the Institute for Nuclear Studies of the University of Chicago from 1952 to 1955, while studying under Enrico Fermi, and at California Institute of Technology from 1955 until his retirement as Robert Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, in 1993. He held numerous visiting professorships at American and European universities, was made a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Physical Society and other academic institutions, and served on a number of official bodies including the President's Science Advisory Committee (1969–72), the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (1974–88), and the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (1994–2001). He was later a distinguished fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, a research foundation which he helped to found in 1982 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He also taught part of the year at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Gell-Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1969 for his revolutionary work in particle physics, a field in which he was preeminent for over 20 years. The explanatory   theory he formulated in 1963 accounted for the presence of the many particles discovered in atomic nuclei and posited that all such particles are composed of basic units that Gell-Mann named "quarks" (a word taken from one of his favorite books, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake), which his own and others' research indicated were one of three fundamental, irreducible building blocks of matter (the others are leptons and intermediate vector bosons). The existence of quarks, and the accuracy of Gell-Mann's theoretical prediction that there were likely six types, was confirmed by experimentation with particle accelerators in the 1980s and 1990s. Gell-Mann's work led to the development of the field theory of quantum chromodynamics, which describes the interactions of subatomic particles. From the 1980s Gell-Mann, who had a well-deserved reputation as a polymath (he described his interests as including "natural history, historical linguistics, archaeology, history, depth psychology, and creative thinking, all subjects connected with biological evolution, cultural evolution, and learning and thinking"), tried to develop a theory of complex adaptive systems that would reflect his concerns about the environment: "restraint in population growth, sustainable economic development, and stability of the world political system." His 1994 book The Quark and the Jaguar, written for general readers rather than fellow scientists, had its origins in this concern. At the Santa Fe Institute he also headed the Evolution of Human Languages Program, which seedks to establish the historical relationships among human languages, on the assumption that all of them may belong to "superfamilies" derived from an original "proto-language" whose characteristics may be discovered. Gell-Mann's publications include Lectures on Weak Interactions of Strongly Interfacing Particles (1961), The Eightfold Way: A Review with a Collection of Reprints (1964, with Yuval Ne'eman), The Quark and the Jaguar (1994), and two edited collections, The Evolution of Human Languages (1992, edited with John A. Hawkins) and Understanding Complexity in the Prehistoric Southwest (1994, edited with George J. Gumerman). In addition, a full-scale biography of Gell-Mann was published by George Johnson: Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics (1999). (Drew Silver (2nd ed.)