Gell-Mann was born in Lower Manhattan to a family ofJewish immigrants from theAustro-Hungarian Empire, specifically fromCzernowitz in present-dayUkraine.[9][10] His parents were Pauline (née Reichstein) and Arthur Isidore Gelman, who taughtEnglish as a second language.[11] Gell-Mann married J. Margaret Dow in 1955; they had a daughter and a son. Margaret died in 1981, and in 1992 he marriedMarcia Southwick, whose son became his stepson.[3]
Gell-Mann graduated from Yale with a bachelor's degree in physics in 1948 and intended to pursue graduate studies in physics. He sought to remain in theIvy League for his graduate education and applied toPrinceton University as well asHarvard University. He was rejected by Princeton and accepted by Harvard, but the latter institution was unable to offer him needed financial assistance. He was then accepted by theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and received a letter fromVictor Weisskopf urging him to attend MIT and become Weisskopf's research assistant. This would provide Gell-Mann with the financial assistance he required. Unaware of MIT's eminent status in physics research, Gell-Mann was "miserable" and in characteristic dark irony, said he first considered suicide.[14][15]
Gell-Mann was on sabbatical at theCollège de France for the academic year 1958–1959.[22] Gell-Mann spent several periods atCERN, the laboratories of the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland, including time as a fellow of theJohn Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellow.[23][24]
In 1972, he was on CERN’s payroll as visiting professor. That same year, Gell-Mann was criticized for his involvement withJASON, a scientific advisory group that supported the U.S. Department of Defense during the Vietnam War. His association with the group was the focus of protests in France and Italy.[25][26]
In 1984 Gell-Mann was one of several co-founders of theSanta Fe Institute—a non-profit theoretical research institute inSanta Fe, New Mexico intended to study various aspects of acomplex system and disseminate the notion of a separate interdisciplinary study ofcomplexity theory.[27][28]
In his 1994 popular bookThe Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, Gell-Mann acknowledged financial support fromJeffrey Epstein, who contributed via the Santa Fe Institute.[29][30] In 2003, Gell-Mann also contributed a letter toThe First Fifty Years, a collection of birthday greetings for Epstein.[31] Years later, in 2011, Gell-Mann reportedly attended the "Mindshift Conference" on Epstein’s private island,Little Saint James. The gathering was organized by Epstein and science promoterAl Seckel.[32][33] Gell-Mann’s name also appeared in Epstein’s so-called "black book," a personal address book listing Epstein’s close contacts.[34]
George Johnson has written abiography of Gell-Mann,Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann, and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics (1999),[35] Although Gell-Mann himself criticizedStrange Beauty for some inaccuracies, with one interviewer reporting him wincing at the mention of it, the book was acclaimed by a number of his colleagues.[36] A revised second edition was published in 2023 by the Santa Fe Institute Press with a foreword byDouglas Hofstadter.[37] In 2012 Gell-Mann and his companionMary McFadden published the bookMary McFadden: A Lifetime of Design, Collecting, and Adventure.[38]
Gell-Mann's work in the 1950s involved recently discoveredcosmic ray particles that came to be calledkaons andhyperons. Classifying these particles led him to propose that aquantum number, calledstrangeness, would be conserved by thestrong and theelectromagnetic interactions, but not by the weak interaction.[41] Another of Gell-Mann's ideas is theGell-Mann–Okubo formula, which was, initially, a formula based on empirical results, but was later explained by hisquark model.[42] Gell-Mann andAbraham Pais were involved in explaining this puzzling aspect of theneutral kaon mixing.[43]
Murray Gell-Mann's fortunate encounter with mathematicianRichard Earl Block at Caltech, in the fall of 1960, "enlightened" him to introduce a novel classification scheme, in 1961, forhadrons.[44][45] A similar scheme had been independently proposed byYuval Ne'eman, and has come to be explained by the quark model.[46] Gell-Mann referred to the scheme as theeightfold way, because of theoctets of particles in the classification (the term is a reference to theEightfold Path ofBuddhism).[3][17]
Gell-Mann, along with Maurice Lévy, developed thesigma model ofpions, which describes low-energy pion interactions.[47]
In 1964, Gell-Mann and, independently,George Zweig went on to postulate the existence ofquarks, particles which make up thehadrons of this scheme. The name "quark" was coined by Gell-Mann, and is a reference to the novelFinnegans Wake, byJames Joyce ("Three quarks for Muster Mark!" book 2, episode 4). Zweig had referred to the particles as "aces",[48] but Gell-Mann's name caught on. Quarks, antiquarks, andgluons were soon established as the underlying elementary objects in the study of the structure of hadrons. He was awarded aNobel Prize in Physics in 1969 for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions.[49]
In the 1960s, he introducedcurrent algebra as a method of systematically exploiting symmetries to extract predictions from quark models, in the absence of reliable dynamical theory. This method led to model-independentsum rules confirmed by experiment, and provided starting points underpinning the development of theStandard Model (SM), the widely accepted theory of elementary particles.[50][51]
^Rodgers, Peter (June 1, 2003)."The many worlds of Murray Gell-Mann".Physics World.Archived from the original on November 2, 2023. RetrievedMay 26, 2019.In a review in the Caltech magazineEngineering & Science, Gell-Mann's colleague, the physicistDavid Goodstein, wrote: "I don't envy Murray the weird experience of reading so penetrating and perceptive a biography of himself. George Johnson has written a fine biography of this important and complex man".Goodstein, David L. (1999)."Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics".Engineering and Science.62 (4). Caltech.ISSN0013-7812.Archived from the original on May 29, 2019. RetrievedJune 3, 2019..Physicist and Nobel laureatePhilip Anderson, called the book "a masterpiece of scientific explication for the layman" and a "must read" in a review for theTimes Higher Education Supplement and in his chapter on Gell-Mann from a 2011 book.Anderson, Philip W. (2011)."Ch. V Genius. Search for Polymath's Elementary Particles".More and Different: Notes from a Thoughtful Curmudgeon. World Scientific. pp. 241–2.ISBN978-981-4350-14-3. Philip Anderson,More and Different, Chapter V, World Scientific, 2011.Sheldon Glashow, another Nobel laureate, gaveStrange Beauty a generally positive review while noting some inaccuracies,Glashow, Sheldon Lee (2000). "Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics".American Journal of Physics.68 (6): 582.Bibcode:2000AmJPh..68..582J.doi:10.1119/1.19489.and physicist and science historianSilvan S. Schweber called the book "an elegant biography of one of the outstanding theorists of the twentieth century" though he noted that Johnson did not go into depth about Gell-Mann's work withmilitary–industrial organizations like theInstitute for Defense Analyses.Schweber, Silvan S. (2000). "Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics".Physics Today.53 (8):43–44.Bibcode:2000PhT....53h..43J.doi:10.1063/1.1310122.Johnson has written that Gell-Mann was a perfectionist and thatThe Quark and the Jaguar was consequently submitted late and incomplete.Johnson, George (July 1, 2000)."The Jaguar and the Fox".The Atlantic.Archived from the original on May 5, 2019. RetrievedMay 27, 2019. In an item on Edge.org, Johnson described the back story of his relationship with Gell-MannWest, Geoffrey (May 28, 2019)."Remembering Murray".Edge Foundation, Inc.Archived from the original on May 28, 2019. RetrievedJune 3, 2019. and noted that an errata sheet appears on the biography's webpage.Johnson, George."Errata".Talaya.net.Archived from the original on May 28, 2019. RetrievedJune 3, 2019.. Gell-Mann's one-time Caltech associateStephen Wolfram called Johnson's book "a very good biography of Murray, which Murray hated". name=wolfram>Stephen Wolfram,Remembering Murray Gell-Mann (1929-2019), Inventor of QuarksArchived June 1, 2019, at theWayback Machine Wolfram also wrote that Gell-Mann thought the writing ofThe Quark and the Jaguar to be responsible for a heart attack he (Gell-Mann) had had.
^Ellis, John (2011). "Prospects for New Physics at the LHC". In Fritzsch, Harald; Phua, K. K.; Baaquie, B. E. (eds.).Proceedings of the Conference in Honour of Murray Gell-Mann's 80th Birthday: Quantum Mechanics, Elementary Particles, Quantum Cosmology and Complexity : Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, February 24–26, 2010. World Scientific.ISBN9789814335607.
^Cao, Tian Yu (2010).From Current Algebra to Quantum Chromodynamics: A Case for Structural Realism. Cambridge University Press.ISBN9781139491600.
^M. Gell-Mann,P. Ramond andR. Slansky, inSupergravity, ed. by D. Freedman and P. Van Nieuwenhuizen, North Holland, Amsterdam (1979), pp. 315–321.ISBN044485438X
^Rickles, Dean (2014).A Brief History of String Theory: From Dual Models to M-Theory. Springer Science & Business Media.ISBN9783642451287.OCLC968779591.
^Herman Wouk (2010).The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion.Hachette Digital, Inc.ISBN9780316096751.Feynman, Gell-Mann, Weinberg, and their peers accept Newton's incomparable stature and shrug off his piety, on the kindly thought that the old man got into the game too early. ... As for Gell-Mann, he seems to see nothing to discuss in this entire God business, and in the index toThe Quark and the Jaguar God goes unmentioned. Life he called a "complex adaptive system", which produces interesting phenomena such as the jaguar and Murray Gell-Mann, who discovered the quark. Gell-Mann is a Nobel-class tackler of problems, but for him the existence of God is not one of them.
^"Murray Gell-Mann".amacad.org. February 9, 2023.Archived from the original on November 3, 2023. RetrievedJune 6, 2020.
^"Murray Gell-Mann 1966".US Department of Energy, Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award. May 3, 2016. Archived fromthe original on May 22, 2017. RetrievedMay 25, 2019.For his contributions of the highest significance to the theory of elementary and theoretical work in the field of physics.
Fritzsch, H.; Gell-Mann, M. (1972)."Current algebra- quarks and what else?". In Jackson, J.D.; Roberts, A.; International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (eds.).Proceedings of the XVI International Conference on High Energy Physics. Vol. 2. National Accelerator Laboratory. pp. 135–165.OCLC57672574.
