Gell-Mann, Murray 1929-

GELL-MANN, MURRAY 1929-

Physicist

Early Life and Education

Murray Gell-Mann was born in New York City on 15 September 1929. His parents were immigrants from Austria. Gell-Mann wanted to study archaeology, but his father wanted him to enter a more practical field such as engineering. They compromised, and he majored in physics. Gell-Mann received his B.S. from Yale in 1948 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1951.

Working with Einstein

After MIT he worked for a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton with Albert Einstein, at the University of Chicago from 1952 to 1955, and then at the California Institute of Technology. He became a full professor while in his mid twenties, only four years after receiving his Ph.D.

Work with Atomic and Subatomic Particles

Some of his greatest work was done with fellow Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman, with whom he studied the theory of weak interactions, which explains spontaneous radioactive decay in the nuclei of atoms. He also described "strangeness" (named from a quote by Francis Bacon), which explains mathematically how newfound (in 1953) subatomic particles interact.

A Theory of Subatomic Families

In 1961 Gell-Mann developed the theory of the "eightfold way" (named after a Buddhist concept of eightfold ways to reduce pain) to make sense of the "particle zoo" resulting from the discovery of more and more new subatomic particles. He showed that all subatomic particles belong to eight (or maybe ten) families, which have similar properties. His theory predicted that new particles would be found, proven with the discovery of omega minus one.

Quarks

Gell-Mann theorized that all subatomic particles are composed of three basic units, called quarks (a word Gell-Mann took from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, 1930), which have a fractional electrical charge. His quark hypothesis was widely accepted and many additional quarks have been predicted and verified. Gell-Mann also produced some of the best science of the century. He received the prestigious Heineman Prize from the American Physical Society in 1956 and, in 1969, won the Nobel Prize.