Strange Beauty

Our knowledge of fundamental particle physics contains not one fruitful idea that does not carry the name of Murray Gell-Mann.

-Richard Feynman

The boy in the photo is Murray, of course. They say a picture speaks a thousand word, so I suggest you spare a moment to take a good look. The intensity leaps out of the picture..

Recently I finished reading 'Strange Beauty', the biography of Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann by George Johnson. Now you would expect the guy to be smart, being a Nobel Laureate, but read the book; you probably couldn't have imagined someone could be this smart. Even Sheldon might seem like an understatement ;-). He earned his PhD at 21 from MIT, and did some phenomenal work on cosmic rays, introducing the notion of strangeness, then went on to discover what he called the Eightfold way, a classification scheme for hadrons, and the quark model (he also introduced the notion of quark colors). Some of these things were independently discovered by others (like quarks by George Zweig) at about the same time, but he enjoyed a "two-decade reign as emperor of elementary particles" as Sheldon Glashow (Nobel Laureate, Physics, 1979) once put it. And here's a little demystification. He did not actually borrow the word 'quark' from James Joyce. He made the sound ('kwork') himself, just borrowed the spelling.

The book is balanced in its treatment of his life and his work. Many of the basics of particle physics are explained in an approachable way. Also well explored is the personal side of the man, like his perfectionist nature, which made him correct pronounciations of people's own names. Or his insurmountable writing block, because of which he failed to deliver his official Nobel lecture for printing. Or the seemingly cruel way in which he seemed to treat those around him sometimes. But all this makes him more human, not less.

Good biographies teach you something about their subject, but the best ones are those which also teach you something about life or yourself. This one fits the bill. Highly recommended!!