Murray Gell-Mann

From Philosopedia

Gell-Mann, Murray (15 September 1929 - )

Gell-Mann, who received a Nobel Laureate in physics (1969), teaches at the California Institute of Technology. A theoretical physicist, he is a member of the science and grants committee of the Leakey Foundation. Also, he is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism and was the American Humanist Associations Humanist of the Year 2005.

Before winning the Nobel prize, Dr. Gell-Mann co-authored with Yaval Ne’eman The Eightfold Way (1964), which explains their scheme for classifying interacting particles. He has also written The Quark and the Jaguar, Adventures in the Simple and the Complex (1994). Stephen W. Hawking said it “is about how the wonderful diversity of the universe can arise out of a set of fairly simple basic laws. It is written by an expert in both the fundamental laws and the complex structure that they can produce.” Of the book, Carl Sagan added, “It is always a pleasure to see a first-class mind grappling with the greatest mysteries, and at the same time resolutely resisting mysticism.”

In 1994, science reporter William J. Broad of The New York Times (26 April 1994), wrote a front-page news article about Gell-Mann entitled TOP QUARK, LAST PIECE IN PUZZLE OF MATTER, APPEARS TO BE IN PLACE. The journalist described how an international team of 439 scientists working at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory had announced that the quest, begun by philosophers in ancient Greece to understand the nature of matter, may have ended in Batavia, Illinois, with the discovery of evidence for the top quark, the last of twelve subatomic building blocks which now are believed to constitute all of the material world. Dr.

Gell-Mann took the word quark from a line in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: “Three quarks for Muster Mark.” Gell-Mann predicted that quarks in normal matter came in groups of three: two up quarks and one down quark in protons; and two down quarks and one up quark in neutrons. The ideas were radical and strongly resisted, Broad explained, “partly because the fractional charges of his quarks seemed implausible. But his theories explained much, and were soon partly confirmed by particle discoveries.”

Although the discovery may not make any difference in everyday life, it is a high intellectual achievement. The Standard Model, which is central to understanding the nature of time, matter, and the universe, has now allegedly been validated.

(For a review of The Quark and the Jaguar by Warren Allen Smith, see Free Inquiry, Summer 1996)

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