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Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019) and His Science


Affiliations
1 Department of Physics and Astrophysics, University of Delhi, Delhi 110 007, India
2 International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bengaluru 560 089, India
 

Murray Gell-Mann was among the very eminent and influential physicists of the second half of the 20th century. He was born in New York City on 15 September 1929. He graduated from Columbia Grammar School at the age of 14 and got his undergraduate degree from Yale at 18. Gell-Mann obtained his doctorate degree from MIT, under the supervision of Victor Weisskopf, in just two and a half years. He joined the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, in 1951 where he worked with Francis Low. During 1952–54, he was briefly on the faculty of the University of Chicago with Enrico Fermi and Marvin Goldberger. He joined Caltech in 1955 as an associate professor on the recommendation of Richard Feynman, where he continued until retirement in 1993 as Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics. 1993 onwards he remained the R. A. Millikan Professor Emeritus at Caltech and distinguished Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969 ‘for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions’. His students include Sydney Coleman, James Hartle, Kenneth G. Wilson, Christopher T. Hill and Barton Zweibach. He passed away in Santa Fe on 24 May 2019.
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  • Gell-Mann, M., Complexity, 1996, 2, 9.

  • Johnson, G., Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in TwentiethCentury Physics, Vintage, 2001.

  • Gell-Mann, M., Strangeness. J. Phys. Colloques, 1982, 43, 68–395; Nambu, Y., Phys. Today, 2009, 62(8), 58; https:// doi.org/10.1063/1.3206100.

  • Gell-Mann, M. and Ne’eman, Y., The Eight Fold Way, CRC Press, reprinted in 2000.

  • Gell-Mann, M., The Eightfold Way: A theory of strong interaction symmetry. Synchrotron Laboratory Report CTSL20, California Institute of Technology, 1961; doi:10.2172/4008239; Okubo, S., Prog. Theor Phys., 1962, 27(5), 949– 966.

  • Barnes, V. E. et al., Observation of a hyperon with strangeness minus three. Phys. Rev. Lett., 1964, 12(8), 204–206.

  • Gell-Mann, M., A schematic model of Baryons and mesons. Phys. Lett., 1964, 8(3), 214–215; Zweig, G., An SU(3) model for strong interaction symmetry and its breaking, CERN Report No. 8182/TH.401, 1964.

  • Okun, L. B., The impact of the Sakata model. Prog. Theor. Phys. Suppl., 2007, 167, 163–174; doi:10.1143/PTPS.167.163 [hep-ph/0611298]; On the way from Sakatons to quarks. Int. J. Mod. Phys. A, 2015, 30(1), 1530008.

  • Han, M. Y. and Nambu, Y., Three triplet model with double SU(3) symmetry. Phys. Rev., 1965, 139(4B), B1006– B1010; doi:10.1103/PhysRev.139.B1006

  • Nambu, Y., In Preludes in Theoretical Physics (eds De-Shalit, A., Feshbach, H. and van Hove, L.), North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1966.

  • Nambu, Y., Reminiscences of the youthful years of particle physics. In Nambu: A Foreteller of Modern Physics (eds Eguchi, T. and Han, M. Y.), World Scientific, Singapore, 2014.

  • Fritzsch, H. and Gell-Mann, M., Current algebra: Quarks and what else. In Proceedings of the XVI International Conference on High Energy Physics (eds Jackson, J. D. et al.), Chicago, 1972, p. 135, e-Print: hep-ph/0208010.

  • Bloom, E. D. et al., High-energy inelastic e–p scattering at 6 and 10 degrees. Phys. Rev. Lett., 1969, 23, 930–934; Breidenbach, M. et al., Observed behavior of highly inelastic electron–proton scattering. Phys. Rev. Lett., 1969, 23(16), 935–939; Lindley, D., Focus: Landmarksdiscovery of particles inside the proton; https://physics.aps.org/articles/v7/81

  • Wilson, K. G., The renormalization group: critical phenomena and the Kondo problem. Rev. Mod. Phys., 1975, 47(4), 773–840.

  • Gross, D. and Wilczek, F., A watershed: the emergence of QCD. CERN Courier, 2013, 53(1), 24; Gross D., Asymptotic freedom and QCD: a historical perspective. Nucl. Phys. B (Proc. Suppl.), 2004, 135(1), 193–211, doi:10.1016/j.nuclphysbps.2004.09.049

  • Dhar, A., Patel, A. and Wadia, S. R., The science and legacy of Richard Phillips Feynman, arXiv: 1810.07409.

  • Weinberg, S., V–A was the key. J. Phys.: Conf. Ser., 2009, 196, 012002, doi: 10.1088/1742-6596/196/1/012002

  • Gell-Mann, M. and Low, F. E., Quantum electrodynamics at small distances. Phys. Rev., 1954, 95(5), 1300–1312; Stueckelberg, E. C. G. and Petermann, A., Larenormalisation des constants dans la theorie de quanta. Helv. Phys. Acta, 1953, 26(5), 499–520.

  • Gell-Mann, M. and Hartle, J. B., Adaptive coarse graining, environment, strong decoherence, and quasiclassical realms. Phys. Rev. A, 2014, 89(5), 052125, doi: 10.1103/PhysRevA.89.052125, [arXiv: 1312.7454 [quant-ph]]

  • Hartle, J. B., Generalizing quantum mechanics for quantum spacetime, arXiv:gr-qc/0602013, Proceedings of the 23rd Solvay Conference on Quantum Structure of Space and Time, 2006.

  • Gell-Mann, M., Interview by Sara Lippincott. Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico, July 1997. Oral History Project, California Institute of Technology Archives; http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:O H_Gell-Mann_M (accessed on 4 August 2019).

  • German, J., Something from nothing: SFI emerges and synthesizes; https:// www.santafe.edu/about/history

  • Anderson, P. W., Complexity II: The Santa Fe Institute. Phys. Today, 1992, 45(1), 9.

  • Gell-Mann, M., The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, W. H. Freedman and Co, 1994.

  • Gell-Mann, M. and Lloyd, S., Information measures, effective complexity, and total information. Complexity, 1996, 2(1), 44–52.

  • Gell-Mann, M., What is complexity. Complexity, 1995, 1(1), 16–19.

  • Gell-Mann, M. and Tsallis, C. (eds), Nonextensive Entropy – Interdisciplinary Applications, Oxford University Press, New York, 2004.

  • Hanel, R., Thurner, S. and Gell-Mann, M., Generalized entropies and the transformation group of super-statistics. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 2011, 108(16), 6390–6394.

  • Peters, O. and Gell-Mann, M., Evaluating gambles using dynamics. Chaos, 2016, 26(2), 023103.

  • Gell-Mann, M., Weak interactions of strongly interacting particles. Summer School Lecture Notes, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, 1963.


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  • Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019) and His Science

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Authors

Sanjay Jain
Department of Physics and Astrophysics, University of Delhi, Delhi 110 007, India
Spenta R. Wadia
International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bengaluru 560 089, India

Abstract


Murray Gell-Mann was among the very eminent and influential physicists of the second half of the 20th century. He was born in New York City on 15 September 1929. He graduated from Columbia Grammar School at the age of 14 and got his undergraduate degree from Yale at 18. Gell-Mann obtained his doctorate degree from MIT, under the supervision of Victor Weisskopf, in just two and a half years. He joined the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, in 1951 where he worked with Francis Low. During 1952–54, he was briefly on the faculty of the University of Chicago with Enrico Fermi and Marvin Goldberger. He joined Caltech in 1955 as an associate professor on the recommendation of Richard Feynman, where he continued until retirement in 1993 as Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics. 1993 onwards he remained the R. A. Millikan Professor Emeritus at Caltech and distinguished Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969 ‘for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions’. His students include Sydney Coleman, James Hartle, Kenneth G. Wilson, Christopher T. Hill and Barton Zweibach. He passed away in Santa Fe on 24 May 2019.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.18520/cs%2Fv117%2Fi7%2F1224-1231