Murray Gell-Mann

Murray Gell-Mann (New York, September 15, 1929-Santa Fe, May 24, 2019) was an American physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969 for his discoveries. about elementary particles. It was he who gave the quark its name, a name taken from the novel Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce.

He studied at Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a professor since 1955, at the California Institute of Technology (Pasadena), where he has taught theoretical physics since 1967. He was a member of NASA since 1964. ^{[citation needed ]}

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969 for his discoveries about elementary particles. The Gell-Mann theory brought order to the chaos that arose when nearly 100 particles were discovered inside the atomic nucleus. Those particles, in addition to protons and neutrons, were made up of other elementary particles, called quarks. The quarks are held together by the exchange of gluons. Along with other researchers, he built the quantum theory of quarks and gluons, called quantum chromodynamics.^{[citation needed ]}

In addition to science, Professor Gell-Mann was interested in other fields, including literature, natural history, historical linguistics, archaeology, history, and psychology.^{[citation needed]}

Murray Gell-Mann is the author of The Quark and the Jaguar, Adventures in the Simplex and the Complex. i>).

Early years and education

Gell-Mann was born in Lower Manhattan to a family of Jewish immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, specifically from Czernowitz in present-day Ukraine. His parents were Pauline (née Reichstein) and Arthur Isidore Gell -Mann, who taught English as a second language.

Driven by an intense childhood curiosity and love of nature and mathematics, he graduated valedictorian from Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School at the age of 14 and later entered Yale College as a Fellow of Jonathan Edwards College. At Yale, he entered the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition and was part of the team representing Yale University (along with Murray Gerstenhaber and Henry O. Pollak) who won second prize in 1947.

Gell-Mann graduated from Yale with a bachelor's degree in physics in 1948 and intended to pursue graduate study in physics. He attempted to remain in the Ivy League for his graduate education and applied to Princeton University as well as Harvard University. He was rejected by Princeton and accepted by Harvard, but the latter institution could not offer him the financial help he needed. He was accepted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and received a letter from Victor Weisskopf urging him to attend MIT and become Weisskopf's research assistant, which would provide Gell-Mann with the financial help he needed. Unaware of MIT's pre-eminent status in physics research, Gell-Mann felt "miserable" while he was in trouble. with the fact that he could not attend Princeton or Harvard and considered suicide. He stated that he realized that he could try to get into MIT first and kill himself later if he seemed really terrible to him. However, he couldn't choose suicide first and then attend MIT; the two things "didn't mix", as Gell-Mann put it.

Gell-Mann received his doctorate in physics from MIT in 1951 after completing a doctoral thesis, entitled "Force Coupling and Nuclear Reactions," under the supervision of Victor Weisskopf.

Career

Gell-Mann was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1951, and a Visiting Research Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1952 to 1953. He was a Visiting Associate Professor at Columbia University and an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago in 1954-1955 before transferring to the California Institute of Technology, where he taught from 1955 until he retired in 1993.

Nuclear Physics

In 1958, Gell-Mann in collaboration with Richard Feynman, in parallel with the independent team of E.C. George Sudarshan and Robert Marshak, discovered the chiral structures of the weak interaction in physics and developed the V-A theory (Axial Minus Vector Theory). This work followed Chien-Shiung Wu's experimental discovery of parity violation., just as Chen-Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee had suggested, theoretically.

Gell-Mann's work in the 1950s focused on the newly discovered cosmic-ray particles that came to be called kaons and hyperons. The classification of these particles led him to propose that a quantum number called extraneousness would be preserved by strong and electromagnetic interactions, but not by weak interactions. (Kazuhiko Nishijima came to this idea independently, calling the amount MIL MIL {displaystyle eta }- charge for the eta meson.) Another of Gell-Mann's ideas is the formula of the Gell-Mann-Okubo mass, which was initially a formula based on empirical results, but which was later explained by its quarks model. Gell-Mann and Abraham Pais participated in the explanation of the disconcerting aspect of the mixture of neutral kaons. (See Kaon.)

Murray Gell-Mann's fortunate meeting with mathematician Richard Earl Block at Caltech in the fall of 1960 "illuminated" to introduce a novel classification scheme, in 1961, for hadrons. A similar scheme had been independently proposed by Yuval Ne'eman, and is now explained by the quark model. Gell-Mann referred to to the scheme as the eighth path, due to the octets of particles in the classification (the term is a reference to the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism).

Gell-Mann, together with Maurice Lévy, developed the sigma model of pions, which describes the interactions of low-energy pions.

In 1964, Gell-Mann and, independently, George Zweig went on to postulate the existence of quarks, the particles of which the hadrons in this scheme are composed. The name was coined by Gell-Mann and is a reference to the novel Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce ("Three Quarks for Muster Mark!" book 2, episode 4). Zweig had referred to the particles as 'aces', but the Gell-Mann name caught on. Quarks, antiquarks, and gluons soon became established as the underlying elementary objects in the study of hadron structure. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969 for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions.

In the 1960s, he introduced stream algebra as a method of systematically exploiting symmetries to extract predictions from quark models, in the absence of a reliable dynamical theory. This method led to the independent addition rules of the model, confirmed by experiment, and provided starting points that underpinned the development of the Standard Model (SM), the widely accepted theory of elementary particles.

In 1972, he and Harald Fritzsch introduced the conserved quantum number 'color charge', and later, together with Heinrich Leutwyler, coined the term quantum chromodynamics (QCD) as the gauge theory of interaction strong. The quark model is a part of the QCD, and has been robust enough to naturally accommodate the discovery of new "flavors" of quarks, which replaced the eight-way scheme.

Gell-Mann was responsible, along with Pierre Ramond and Richard Slansky, and independently of Peter Minkowski, Rabindra Mohapatra, Goran Senjanović, Sheldon Glashow, and Tsutomu Yanagida, for the mass theory of neutrinos, which produces masses at great scale in any theory with a right-handed neutrino. He is also known to have played a role in sustaining string theory during the 1970s and early 1980s, supporting that line of research at a time when it was a niche topic of interest.

Science of complexity and popularization

At the time of his death, Gell-Mann was the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, as well as a University Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine at the University of Southern California. He was a member of the editorial board of the Encyclopædia Britannica . In 1984 Gell-Mann was one of several co-founders of the Santa Fe Institute—a nonprofit theoretical research institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico designed to study various aspects of a complex system and to spread the notion of separate interdisciplinary study. of complexity theory.

Murray Gell-Mann in Nice (France) in 2012.

He wrote a popular science book on physics and the science of complexity, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex (1994). The title of the book is taken from a line from a poem by Arthur Sze: "The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night".

Author George Johnson has written a biography of Gell-Mann, Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann, and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics (1999), which was shortlisted for the Royal Society Book Prize. Gell-Mann himself criticized Strange Beauty for some inaccuracies, and one interviewer reported that he winced at mentioning it. In a review in Caltech magazine Engineering & Science, Gell-Mann's colleague, physicist David Goodstein, wrote: "I do not envy Murray the strange experience of reading such a penetrating and insightful biography of himself... George Johnson has written a excellent biography of this important and complex man. Physicist and Nobel laureate Philip Anderson called the book a "masterpiece of scientific explanation for the layman." and "must read" in a review for the Times Higher Education Supplement and in his chapter on Gell-Mann from a 2011 book. Sheldon Glashow, another Nobel laureate, gave Strange Beauty a The review was generally positive though noting some inaccuracies, with physicist and historian of science Silvan S. Schweber calling the book an "elegant biography of one of the foremost theorists of the 20th century", though noting that Johnson did not furthered Gell-Mann's work with military-industrial organizations such as the Institute for Defense Analysis. Johnson has written that Gell-Mann was a perfectionist and that, consequently, The Quark and the Jaguar was submitted late and incompletely. In an article in Edge. org, Johnson described the history of his relationship with Gell-Mann, noting that an errata sheet appears on the biography's web page. Gell-Mann's former partner at Caltech, Stephen Wolfram, rated Johnson's book as "a very good biography of Murray, which Murray hated." Wolfram also wrote that Gell-Mann thought the writing of The Quark and the Jaguar was responsible for a heart attack he (Gell-Mann) had had.

In 2012 Gell-Mann and his partner Mary McFadden published the book Mary McFadden: A Life of Design, Collecting and Adventure.

Quantum Fundamentals

Gell-Mann was a proponent of the consistent histories approach to understanding quantum mechanics, which he advocated in papers with James Hartle.