The many worlds of Murray Gell-Mann


Murray Gell-Mann's reputation precedes him as he walks through the lobby of the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin for an interview with Physics World. Gell-Mann received the Nobel prize in 1969 for his contributions to elementary particle theory, most notably for the development of the quark model, and there are countless stories about how clever he is. "He has a more profound knowledge of a wider range of subjects than anyone living" wrote fellow Nobel laureate Philip Anderson in a review of Gell-Mann's popular book The Quark and the Jaguar.
In his prime, Gell-Mann enjoyed a "two-decade reign as emperor of elementary particles" according to Sheldon Glashow, also a Nobel laureate in particle theory. But there is another side to him, as Glashow explained in a review of Strange Beauty, a recent biography of Gell-Mann written by George Johnson of the New York Times. "Not only did Gell-Mann devise the lion's share of today's particle lore," wrote Glashow, "but on first acquaintance you would soon learn, through his painfully in-your-face erudition, that he knew far more than you about almost everything, from archaeology, birds and cacti to Yoruban myth and zymology."

There are countless myths about Gell-Mann, and every time a book or an article by or about him is published, more stories and anecdotes are added to the legend. Indeed there are so many stories about Gell-Mann that it would be easy to write an article about him without ever actually meeting him. And at one stage it looked as if that might happen as Gell-Mann - trying to complete a lecture that he was due to give the following day - cancelled an interview with Irish radio and re-arranged his encounter with Physics World for a second time.

But when Gell-Mann does arrive, it is hard to disagree with Johnson's claim in the prologue to Strange Beauty that "contrary to so many of the legends, Gell-Mann likes people and conversation". However, his mood changes towards the end of the interview when the conversation turns to Johnson's biography. Has he read it? "I have looked through it," Gell-Mann winces, "but it is so painful."

So what is the truth about some of the most famous myths? Did Gell-Mann really not write up his Nobel lecture? "I did have a written version of the lecture that I gave in Sweden, but I was not satisfied with it and did not submit it," he explains. "I tried to write a better one, including an adequate discussion of quarks, and agonized over it for months, but in the end, I did not finish it in time for it to be included in the volume."

Gell-Mann says that he often agonizes over writing projects. "On many occasions it has delayed my writing up research, often by a year or more. By that time, it has sometimes happened that another theorist has had a similar idea and has written it up more quickly." Why does he agonize? "I often have a neurotic difficulty with deciding how to put things and in what order. It may stem from my father's criticism of my writing when I was young - he was a perfectionist and I became one too."

Quirks and quarks

Another common claim is that Gell-Mann did not actually believe that quarks were real physical entities. "That is baloney," he says. "I have explained so many times that I believed from the beginning that quarks were confined inside objects like neutrons and protons, and in my early papers on quarks I described how they could be confined either by an infinite mass and infinite binding energy, or by a potential rising to infinity, which is what we believe today to be correct. Unfortunately, I referred to confined quarks as 'fictitious', meaning that they could not emerge to be utilized for applications such as catalysing nuclear fusion." Gell-Mann says that he "did not want to get into debates with philosophers over whether particles that cannot emerge singly can be regarded as real".

So did Gell-Mann get on with the late Richard Feynman when they were both at Caltech and probably the two most famous physicists in the world? "I was initially a great admirer of Dick Feynman, and I know that he thought highly of me and of my research," he recalls. "We worked together for a number of years, but I found that he had difficulty thinking in terms of 'us'. He acted as if the only thing that mattered was his understanding of what was going on. It was all 'I, I, I,' and eventually it got on my nerves." Matters came to a head when Feynman published a book of anecdotes called Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman. "Some of the sentences in the book were outrageous and I made him change them in the paperback version."

Gell-Mann's contributions to particle physics are immense, as Sidney Coleman of Harvard University made clear in a review of The Quark and the Jaguar: "Strangeness, the renormalization group, the V-A interaction, the conserved vector current, the partially conserved axial current, the eightfold way, current algebra, the quark model, quantum chromodynamics - and this is the shortlist."

Does Gell-Mann still follow developments in physics? "I do not keep up with the details of particle physics," he says, "but I try to have a general idea of what is going on."

When he wrote The Quark and the Jaguar back in the early 1990s, Gell-Mann was confident that superstring theory would ultimately be successful in combining the general theory of relativity with quantum mechanics. Is he still confident that superstring theory - now known as M-theory (see Physics World March 2002 p8) - will ultimately be successful? "I still think that it is very likely," he replies, "but it is essential to describe M-theory and to extract its predictions." And does he think that progress in superstring theory is moving fast enough? "You know how it is with human endeavours," he replies. "Enthusiasm is followed by disappointment and even depression, and then by renewed enthusiasm."

So when and why did Gell-Mann move away from the simple - if quarks and the Standard Model of particle physics can be called simple - and start getting interested in the complex? "I have been interested in phenomena involving complexity, diversity and evolution since I was a young boy," he says, "but it so happened that I took up elementary particle theory. Now, at the Santa Fe Institute, I can do research on both the simple and the complex." Gell-Mann chose the title of his book - The Quark and the Jaguar - to reflect his interest in both the simple and the complex, and also his concerns about sustainability and the maintenance of biological and ecological diversity

So what is complexity? "There are many different definitions of complexity," he says, "but when we talk about it in ordinary conversation - and in most scientific discourse as well - we really mean what I call 'effective complexity'. This is the algorithmic information content - a kind of minimum description length - of the regularities of the entity in question."

Gell-Mann illustrates what he means with his neck tie. "A simple pattern - say one with regimental stripes - has regularities that take only a short time to describe. The regularities of a complex necktie - like one designed by the late Jerry Garcia [leader of the Grateful Dead rock band] - require a much longer description," he explains. "But how do we know that the regularities we are discussing are those of the pattern? What about the soup stains, wine stains and so on? If you are a dry cleaner, you might be interested in those and not in the pattern."

Radio astronomy is another example. "We tend to think of music on the radio as regular," says Gell-Mann, "while static is random. But when researchers at Bell Labs discovered that static tends to come from particular places in the sky, the whole field of radio astronomy opened up."

Some researchers have dismissed effective complexity as being too context dependent, or even subjective, but Gell-Mann disagrees, pointing out that similar judgements are routinely made in statistical mechanics.

Language

Gell-Mann has always been interested in languages and recently received funding to organize a group of linguists to explore distant relationships among human languages. The idea is to place the acknowledged families of languages - such as Indo-European, Uralic and Austronesian - into "superfamilies" and so on back to a possible proto-language for the whole world. The project also involves archaeologists, physical anthropologists and geneticists.

Gell-Mann confesses that "many professors of historical linguistics claim that this kind of work is unscientific", but, not surprisingly, he disagrees. Critics of Gell-Mann's approach claim that the evidence for larger families of languages is too sparse. It is not possible, they say, to establish relationships between different languages that involve "time depths" of greater than the six or seven thousand years.

But if his critics are correct, Gell-Mann counters, then the evidence for the language families that are widely accepted would be marginal. "But we know that is not the case," he says. "The evidence for Indo-European, Uralic, Austronesian and so on is overwhelming, and there is no reason not to go deeper."

Gell-Mann explains that the project - which relies both on powerful computer techniques and the expertise of professional linguists - has to cope with the fact that both the meaning and the sound of a word can change over time. "Take the root of the word for 'woman' in many Indo-European languages," he says. "It is 'gyne' (as in gynaecology) in ancient Greek, 'zhena' in Church Slavic, 'bean' (as in banshee) in Irish and 'kvinna' in Swedish."

Final words

Gell-Mann's interest in words was evident at an early age. He was only 10 years old when he first leafed through a copy of Finnegans Wake - the novel by James Joyce that later provided him with the word "quark" - and was able to study Joyce's original manuscript for the novel during a visit to Dublin in the middle of last year (see Physics World September 2002 p9).

But if Joyce is one of Gell-Mann's favourite writers, then his biographer George Johnson is anything but. If you are not Murray Gell-Mann, Johnson's biography is an engrossing portrait of a brilliant physicist who happens to be a complex and, at times, troubled character. Strange Beauty was greeted by glowing reviews and is more than a match for James Gleick's acclaimed biography of Gell-Mann's great rival Feynman.

Gell-Mann, however, was not impressed. "He got many things wrong about physics, about my family and my personal life, and about my motivations in writing papers the way I did. I could so easily have set him straight," he says. "He even got wrong the part of New York where I lived when I was a baby. A number of reviews were headlined 'Boy from the Lower East Side'."

Despite his misgivings about the biography, Gell-Mann has no plans to publish an autobiography, although he might write a book of anecdotes with a collaborator. He is also writing up his Ulam lectures on simplicity, complexity, regularity and randomness - which he gave at the Santa Fe Institute in 1999 - at a popular level.

Gell-Mann also continues to work on at least one physics problem - an interpretation of quantum mechanics that is suitable for quantum cosmology. However, he is no fan of the standard or Copenhagen interpretations of quantum theory. "The idea that quantum mechanics depends on having a physicist outside the system making repeated measurements - or measurements on repeated copies - is clearly absurd when you are talking about the universe," he says. "Is it imaginable that in the 13 or 14 billion years before human life appeared there was no quantum mechanics? That is ludicrous."

Interesting post
I object to the idea of an infinity of new universe really appearing, although according to this I might not be thinking about the theory in the right way. I've only read Q22 so far (which sounds suspicious) so I'm not sure what he is actually saying........yet.........


There doesn't seem to be any mention of Julian Schwinger who certainly deserves mention as a contemporary of these two

Yes, Schwinger definitely deserves mention, as he seems to be falsely under-rated, or at any rate, not as widely known, as the other "Mr. Hollywood" physicists. Fascinating links, btw. From your link at the nobel.se, I'm now very curious to find out more about the Source Theory he developed. Here is the excerpt from the nobel.se link:

The Quark and The Jaguar:

Murray Gell-Mann is not your average Nobel Laureate and this book's title is an illustration of why that is the case. The name 'quark' comes to him from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake which was a subject that Joseph Campbell found most telling. In fact the symbology of this book is highly archetypical and Keltic or Druidic. The Jaguar is more than a mere ecological or environmental icon. The Cult of Kukulcan is THE Jaguar Cult. Kukulcan of the Toltecs is a white man of the Druidic leaders who escaped Roman domination and proscription. The Pyramid at Chichen Itza and a stele I discovered nearby which is not on the tour and lead to my being threatened with a Mexican jail on my second visit there is most important. It is this stele which was so important in my peronal investigations of Time and our human history or culture. It is the Temple of Kukulcan when it was originally built before they re-built around the original structure. You can see the original temple from inside the altar area enclosed at the top of this structure.

Who was responsible for the re-building? I think the Dragons of Rosicrucian type Mystery Schools were influential in the design of the re-building because it has a serpent shadow which appears at certain astronomical events or occasions. The serpent wends its way slowly up the side of the Pyramid. The Prince of Palenque's tomb equalled King Tut's tomb. The Prince is also a white man but more importantly he had the brooch that connects these symbols and Mystery Schools. For you see (though no academic I have read will touch this matter even if they knew it) this brooch of jade was to honor the same blood sport rituals practiced by the Christian Mystery Schools that led to Nero calling them 'cannibals'. It is admitted by HRH Nicholas de Vere in some detail and even Sir Laurence Gardner addresses these rituals though he does not (In Genesis of the Grail Kings) admit what his forwarder de Vere admits. Specifically I refer to Count Dracula or Vlad the Impaler who was a Dragon of the Catholic crusading orders. The jade brooch worn by the Prince of Palenque whose tomb is replete with other serpent symbology is the Vampire god Zotz.

Today we have Skull & Bones with their Obscene Ritual to thank for keeping this ritual alive in some manner. Here is the crux of it. These noble families observed that the Third Eye connected them to knowledge most sublime. The Chanes in Central America went so far as to board their children's heads to make them appear serpent-like. The Merovingian King Dagobert trepanned his head and I think they did this to allow Cosmic Energy to access the Third Eye or Pineal gland because I have found other such things in the archaeological record in diverse areas associated with these secret cults. One of the purposes of human sacrifices such as the Biblical 'Devoted Ones' (See Cahill's Gifts of the Jews) is the harvesting of human pineal glands and thalami with melatonin and (according to Gardner) the iridium and rhodium that constitutes some 5% of the clarified brain. Melatonin means 'workers in the dark' and we all see Dracula is portrayed by Hollywood in this way but that is fiction. The truth is far more horrific. They need this human 'gold' and love to get it while the blood still courses through the Thalami organs.

I provide a review of Gell-Mann's book by a teacher type who has no clue of the complex and integrative man who stuied Yoruba which is the basis of Voudou, for your reading enjoyment if you would like a laugh after contemplating what I have just said. (http://educ.queensu.ca/~science/main/profdev/books/PDBRAV.htm)

Murray's current efforts

DEFINING NATURE:
One of the often quoted studies or opinions of mine is the work of Professor Harold Morowitz in Yale University’s Molecular Biology Department. He wrote an excellent article called ‘Rediscovering the Mind’ which was featured in Psychology Today in August of 1980. He understood the need to integrate the disciplines of all sciences and made a call to others to work towards this worthwhile goal of ancient scientists or mystics. When one studies only one discipline such as anatomy and misses the unseen physical and mathematical or soulful ingredients one will invariably end up with a reductivist or purely theoretical construct; such as has often been the case when modern science moved away from the Scientific Method of Observation to a Direct Inferential approach. This approach has created what Dr. Janice Boddy terms a ‘Global Reifying Force of Materialism’.
Fortunately the quantum physicists who were once denigrated as ‘atom-mysticists’ have been with us throughout the last century and we have people like Murray Gell-Mann who understand the simple laws like As Above, SO Below are complex and worthwhile. Though there is great energy in a vacuum the old saw that says ‘Nothing operates in a vacuum’ is quite true. All things interrelate and are connected and some are Affinitely connected throughout spacetime. Here is some thoughts on a term or word for this needed integrational study from Murray.
“A decade ago, when the Santa Fe Institute was being organized, I coined a word for our principal area of research, a broad transdisciplinary subject covering aspects of simplicity and complexity as well as the properties of complex adaptive systems, including composite complex adaptive systems consisting of many adaptive agents. Unfortunately, I became discouraged about using the term after it met with a lukewarm response from a few of my colleagues. I comforted myself with the thought that perhaps a special name was unnecessary.
Perhaps I should have been more forceful. A name seems to be inevitable. Various authors are now toying with such neologisms as "complexology," which has a Latin head and a Greek tail and does not refer to simplicity. In this note, I should like to try to make up for lost time and put forward what I have long considered to be the best name for our area of study, if it has to have one.
It is important, in my opinion, for the name to connect with both simplicity and complexity. What is most exciting about our work is that it illuminates the chain of connections between, on the one hand, the simple underlying laws that govern the behavior of all matter in the universe and, on the other hand, the complex fabric that we see around us, exhibiting diversity, individuality, and evolution. The interplay between simplicity and complexity is the heart of our subject.
It is interesting to note, therefore, that the two words are related. The Indo-European root *plek- gives rise to the Latin verb plicare, to fold, which yields simplex, literally once folded, from which our English word "simple" derives. But *plek- likewise gives the Latin past participle plexus, braided or entwined, from which is derived complexus, literally braided together, responsible for the English word "complex." The Greek equivalent to plexus is pletoV (plektos), yielding the mathematical term "symplectic," which also has the literal meaning braided together, but comes to English from Greek rather than Latin.
The name that I propose for our subject is "plectics," derived, like mathematics, ethics, politics, economics, and so on, from the Greek. Since plektos with no prefix comes from *plek- , but without any commitment to the notion of "once" as in "simple" or to the notion of "together" as in "complex," the derived word "plectics" can cover both simplicity and complexity.
It is appropriate that plectics refers to entanglement or the lack thereof, since entanglement is a key feature of the way complexity arises out of simplicity, making our subject worth studying. For example, all of us human beings and all the objects with which we deal are essentially bundles of simple quarks and electrons. If each of those particles had to be in its own independent state, we could not exist and neither could the other objects. It is the entanglement of the states of the particles that is responsible for matter as we know it.
Likewise, if the parts of a complex system or the various aspects of a complex situation, all defined in advance, are studied carefully by experts on those parts or aspects and the results of their work are pooled, an adequate description of the whole system or situation does not usually emerge. The reason, of course, is that these parts or aspects are typically entangled with one another. We have to supplement the partial studies with a transdisciplinary "crude look at the whole," and practitioners of plectics often do just that.
I hope that it is not too late for the name "plectics" to catch on. We seem to need it.� (1) I like to find the ‘kernel’ that is fundamental to the macro to micro states of creative realization a lot. I prefer the think of words like Nexus when seeing the required approach expressing.