Strange Beauty
Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
With a New Afterword
"Our knowledge of fundamental physics contains not one fruitful idea that does not carry the name of Murray Gell-Mann."--Richard Feynman
Acclaimed science writer George Johnson brings his formidable reporting skills to the first biography of Nobel Prize-winner Murray Gell-Mann, the brilliant, irascible man who revolutionized modern particle physics with his models of the quark and the Eightfold Way.
Born into a Jewish immigrant family on New York's East 14th Street, Gell-Mann's prodigious talent was evident from an early age--he entered Yale at 15, completed his Ph.D. at 21, and was soon identifying the structures of the world's smallest components and illuminating the elegant symmetries of the universe.
Beautifully balanced in its portrayal of an extraordinary and difficult man, interpreting the concepts of advanced physics with scrupulous clarity and simplicity, Strange Beauty is a tour-de-force of both science writing and biography.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Up, down, top, bottom, strange and charm aren't just states of mind: they're kinds of quarks, the mind-bending, omnipresent sub-subatomic particles co-discovered and named in the early 1960s by the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann. New York Times science reporter Johnson (Fire in the Mind) has written a brisk, accessible life of the Nobel-winning scientist, who will turn 70 next month. Gell-Mann grew up poor in New York City, the son of Eastern European Jews. Still in his teens, he attended Yale and MIT, and soon afterward won notice for his work on cosmic rays. Gell-Mann followed up his insights about quarks with important work at Caltech and elsewhere on superstrings, supergravity and mathematical complexity. His adult life has had its hardships: his daughter gave much of her life to an American Stalinist fringe group, and his wife died of cancer in 1981. (He's since remarried.) Johnson makes clear that Gell-Mann's direct, sometimes arrogant manner could make him difficult to work with; admired by physicists, he failed to achieve the wider fame of his media-friendly colleague, the late Richard Feynman. While Johnson relates such troubles sympathetically, the story of Gell-Mann's life is in large part the story of his and others' researches and discoveries. Explaining difficult fields like quantum physics, Johnson uses as many analogies, and as little math, as he can, while trying always to give some picture of what scientific problems Gell-Mann and his fellow scientists solved. The result is a careful if colloquial biography, perfect for readers who aren't--or aren't yet--working scientists.
