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Strange Beauty
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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.
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. This updated edition, with a new foreword by Douglas Hofstadter, includes reflections on the final years of Gell-Mann's life and his influence on the Santa Fe Institute.
ISBN-13: 9781947864504
Media Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Santa Fe Institute of Science
Publication Date: 12-04-2023
Pages: 610
Product Dimensions: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.50d
Roger Lewin
On the Trail to La Vega
It was Memorial Day weekend of 1996, in the middle of what turned out to be one of New Mexico's worst droughts of
the century. The seemingly endless dry spell reminded many of the climatic disaster said to have driven the Anasazi, the
original inhabitants of this land, from their stone settlements around Mesa Verde, causing the collapse of a civilization. To
escape the heat, I left my house in Santa Fe and drove as high as you can go into the nearby Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
After leaving my Jeep in the ski basin parking lot, already some 10,000 feet above sea level, I began walking higher. My
destination, La Vega, "the meadow," lay at the base of Santa Fe Baldy, an 11,600-foot peak of Precambrian granite that
juts above the timberline.
Almost as soon as I reached the trail head, I realized that, once again, I had misjudged the perversity of New Mexico
weather. Looking out across the Rio Grande Valley, I could see the next mountain range, the Jemez, where just weeks
earlier a fire had devastated fifteen thousand acres of one of my favorite places, the wilderness backcountry of Bandelier
National Monument. Now storm clouds were boiling up over the Jemez and sweeping toward the Sangre de Cristos. The
temperature began dropping, and before long snow flurries, of all things, were swirling around me.
I was wishing I had worn a jacket and long pants instead of khaki shorts and a T-shirt, when, as I rounded a corner on
the trail, I heard a familiar voice. "Well, hello," a man in a floppy cotton hat and a windbreaker called out enthusiastically.
He was walking toward me from the opposite direction. "How are you?" he said. It took me a few seconds to realize that
I had randomly encountered the subject of this biography, my Santa Fe neighbor Murray Gell-Mann, hiking with his
stepson, Nick Levis.
For weeks now I had been trying to pin down Gell-Mann for another interview. He had been running hot and cold ever
since I had told him, two years earlier, that I intended to write his life story. Lately he had been more helpful. But now I
was worrying that his second thoughts were being followed by third and fourth thoughts, and I had no idea what stage our
relationship was in. I was relieved that he seemed genuinely pleased to see me. And I was struck again by how much,
contrary to so many of the legends, Gell-Mann liked people and conversation, the easy camaraderie of encountering
someone familiar on a mountain trail. The physics lore is filled with stories of Gell-Mann cutting down a colleague with a
withering remark, of the mocking names he assigned to people whose ideas he didn't respect. Particle physics is the most
competitive of intellectual sports, and faced with a theory or a theorist he didn't like, Gell-Mann could be merciless. But
up in the mountains, in New Mexico, he seemed almost able to relax.
He introduced me to Nick, who like me was shivering without a jacket. When I said I was headed for La Vega,
Gell-Mann was delighted at the coincidence. "La Vega," he said, his mouth stretched wide to mimic as perfect a northern
New Mexican accent as you might hear in the villages of Chimayo or Truchas, down the other side of the mountain. He
and Nick had also been heading to La Vega when the drop in temperature caused them to turn around, a little way up the
trail, at Nambe Creek -- "Nam-be," Murray said, with just the right amount of padding around the b. Now they were
heading home.
If Gell-Mann was disappointed about not reaching this particular goal, he didn't show it. His eyes sparkled, and he
seemed happy just to be out in the woods again. A few weeks earlier, the cardiologists had stuck a catheter in his chest,
checking on his progress since a recent heart attack. They were relieved to find that the artery they had scraped out -- a
Roto-rooting, Gell-Mann called it -- was still open. There was another, less threatening obstruction further downstream,
but the doctors decided to leave it alone.
I was tempted to turn around and join Murray and Nick on the hike back. But somehow it seemed improper. This was
not Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel laureate, the discoverer of the quark and the Eightfold Way, but simply a man on a
holiday with his stepson. My strategy all along had been to avoid making him feel cramped. I was in this for the long haul.
After a few minutes, we parted ways. I made it about a mile past Nambe Creek. Then, just before the descent into the
meadow, the clouds went black and I also decided to save La Vega for another day. Heading back down the mountain, I
thought about how much I had come to like this brilliant, complicated, always fascinating, and often exasperating man.
***
When we visit the ruins of ancient civilizations, we reserve a peculiar fascination for those giant, elaborate structures that
seem to serve no practical purpose whatsoever: the pyramids built by the Egyptians on the Nile and the Maya in Mexico,
or the large circular kivas of Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico. They stand meaningless now, rock-solid
projections long outlasting whatever ideas they were meant to represent. Catholicism still survives, so we can understand
some of the rationale behind Chartres, St. Peter's, and the other great cathedrals and basilicas of Europe. But we have
barely a hint of the ideas that motivated the construction of the Sphinx.
It is sometimes said that the cathedrals of the late twentieth century are the giant particle accelerators, monuments to the
belief -- far from obvious on its face -- that buried beneath the rough surface of the world we inhabit is a crystalline order
so beautiful and subtle the mind can barely grasp it. Engaging in a fantasy, we can imagine, centuries and centuries from
now, archaeologists (from this planet or perhaps from beyond the solar system) perplexed and captivated by the remains
of the seventeen-mile-circumference particle accelerator being constructed at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear
Research, near Geneva, or the four-mile ring at Fermilab in Illinois. These "atom smashers" are among the largest, most
powerful machines ever built by the human race -- not for the purpose of generating power, like the dams and nuclear
reactors, or for predicting the weather or simulating nuclear explosions, like the supercomputers. Their sole purpose is
intellectual: to find the faintest glimmers of evidence that, despite so many appearances to the contrary, we live in a
mathematically symmetrical universe. How is it that a civilization long ago became so obsessed with this idea? That will be
the riddle of these twentieth-century sphinxes.
If our parchments and our data banks survive along with the wreckage of our great machines, the archaeologists will learn
a remarkable story: How the elders of the church of science came to believe that, despite what we perceive, matter is not
continuous; it is made of invisible particles linked together in a beautiful architecture. As the atomists would show over the
years, the seemingly infinite variety of the world is generated by some one hundred elements, neatly arranged in the
Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements.
Viewed from the heavens, any hint of geometry on the earth -- land divided into rectangles and circles, rock cut into
blocks and piled straight and high -- is usually a sign of intelligent creatures imposing order on an irregular world. But
surely, the scientists believed, this harmony we find so soothing runs deeper. Beneath the world's confusion of forms is a
scaffolding built according to a geometry as pleasing to the mind as a Gothic cathedral.
Since no one could directly see this geometry, the best one could hope for was to study its shadows. And so the
physicists began to build the machinery they believed would provide an indirect glimpse. At first these devices were as
simple as a jar enclosing gold foil leaves that seemed to waft in the wind of an invisible essence called electricity. By the
early twentieth century, scientists were making gas-filled tubes that glowed in the dark with what they took to be
mysterious beams of positive and negative charge. By studying and measuring these weird emanations, the physicists
reached a powerful consensus: The world was even more elegant and symmetrical than Mendeleev and the atomists
dared imagine. The variety of atoms found on the earth and in the sky were made up of combinations of just three
particles: the proton, the electron, and the neutron.
But this newfound simplicity was short-lived. Not content with their instruments, the scientists built bigger and bigger
machines. With the first particle accelerators, small enough to fit on a tabletop, they began smashing their elementary
particles into each other and discovered that they weren't so elementary after all. They could be shattered into fragments.
When they built bigger accelerators to smash the pieces even harder, they were left with fragments of fragments. Placing
carefully designed detectors on mountaintops or sending them aloft in balloons, they found traces of still other particles,
the cosmic rays bombarding the planet from space. Soon, there were so many of these "elementary" constituents that they
threatened the very desire for order that had driven the search. The physicists were in despair.
And then, leading them out of the confusion, came the young scientists whose string of discoveries would do so much to
make sense of it all, to find pattern hiding beneath the confusion. Viewed through these magicians' wonderful new lenses,
the clouds lifted and order shone through. But it came at a curious price. To restore beauty to the core of creation,
humanity was asked to believe in truths stranger than any that had come before.
The most remarkable of these wizards was Murray Gell-Mann. Graduating from Yale University at age eighteen, by the
time he was twenty-one he had earned a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Less than three years
later, he began his revolution with an astonishing theory explaining the unlikely behavior of certain cosmic rays -- the
so-called "strange particles" that bombarded the earth from space. The legend was born. From then until a decade later,
when he proposed the existence of quarks, Gell-Mann dominated particle physics. He is sometimes called the Mendeleev
of the twentieth century, for what he provided was no less than a periodic table of the subatomic particles. In a fanciful
allusion to Buddhist philosophy, Gell-Mann called his organizing scheme the Eightfold Way. While the periodic table
shows that the plenitude of atoms can be generated by combining just three particles -- the proton, electron, and neutron
-- the Eightfold Way shows that the hundreds of subatomic particles are made up of a handful of the elements Gell-Mann
named quarks. Complexity was reduced to simplicity again.
But there is an important difference between the architecture of Mendeleev and the architecture of the Eightfold Way.
And it is here that one can glimpse the enormity of the intellectual upheaval brought on by Gell-Mann and his colleagues.
The periodic table, now a commonplace in any high school chemistry course, classifies the elements according to
properties we can perceive with our senses. Every element is characterized by a unique mass and charge. Mass is
something we feel when we pick up a rock; we generate charge when we shuffle across a carpet and touch a doorknob.
Classified according to these commonsense qualities, the elements miraculously arrange themselves into columns -- the
rare earth metals, the noble gases, and so forth -- whose members share similar characteristics.
In its ability to sift pattern from chaos, the Eightfold Way is at least as powerful, but tantalizingly more subtle. The qualities
Gell-Mann used to arrange the subatomic particles were far more abstract than charge and mass. In his scheme, particles
were classified according to elusive qualities called isospin and strangeness, which have no counterpart in the world of
everyday experience. To describe the invisible patterns said to underlie the material world, Gell-Mann's strangeness was
soon followed by more new qualities with names like charm, truth, and beauty. They "exist" not within the familiar world of
three dimensions (four, if you include time), but within artificially constructed mathematical spaces, imaginary realms of
pure abstraction.
Was this world stuff or mind stuff? To say that Gell-Mann "discovered" the quark is not quite right. All of his great
breakthroughs came from playing with symbols on paper and chalkboards. His most important tools, he liked to say,
were pencil, paper, and wastebasket. His discoveries were not of things but of patterns -- mathematical symmetries that
seemed to reflect, in some ultimately mysterious way, the manner in which subatomic particles behaved. But then
"invented the quark" is not quite right either -- implying some kind of postmodern relativism in which science is pure
construction, just another philosophy. When Mendeleev drew his table, he left blank spaces for unknown elements that
were discovered only years later. This manmade artifice was predicting truths about the real world. And so it was with the
Eightfold Way. New kinds of particles demanded by Gell-Mann's abstract invention showed up in the experimenters'
atom smashers.
The conflicting views of the nature of scientific ideas -- are they discovered or invented? -- are starkly laid out in the titles
of two books: The Hunting of the Quark by Michael Riordan and Constructing Quarks by Andrew Pickering. Are
quarks real particles (whatever that means) or mathematical contrivances? It's a debate that Gell-Mann refused to engage
in. Philosophy, he thought, was a waste of time. But the puzzling questions about the reality of quarks -- particles that
cannot in principle be independently observed -- quietly churned in his mind. One can see the struggle in the words he
wrote and the lectures he gave. Ultimately he and just about everyone stopped worrying about it. Whether invented or
discovered or something in between, it was Gell-Mann's quarks and his Eightfold Way that laid the foundation for the
explanation physicists have given for how the world is made. For years particle physicists argued over who was the
smartest person in their field: Richard Feynman or Murray Gell-Mann.
This idea of breaking the world into pieces and then explaining the pieces in terms of smaller pieces is called reductionism.
It would be perfectly justified to consider Gell-Mann, the father of the quark, to be the century's arch-reductionist. But
very early on, long before mushy notions of holism became trendy, Gell-Mann appreciated an important truth: While you
can reduce downward, that doesn't automatically mean you can explain upward. People can be divided into cells, cells
into molecules, molecules into atoms, atoms into electrons and nuclei, nuclei into subatomic particles, and those into still
tinier things called quarks. But, true as that may be, there is nothing written in the laws of subatomic physics that can be
used to explain higher-level phenomena like human behavior. There is no way that one can start with quarks and predict
that cellular life would emerge and evolve over the eons to produce physicists. Reducing downward is vastly easier than
explaining upward -- a truth that bears repeating.
In the last decade, what aspires to be a new branch of science has sprung up to try and come to grips with complex
phenomena -- organisms, economies, ecosystems, societies, the thunderstorms that sweep through the Rockies.
Gell-Mann, some fifteen years after winning a Nobel Prize for his reductionist tour de force, reversed direction and helped
found the Santa Fe Institute, a world center for studying complexity. Part of his motivation was political. An ardent
conservationist, he hoped to find scientific ammunition to support his environmental causes. He wanted to understand the
complexity of the rain forests and convince the world that they must be preserved. But he also hoped to deepen the
world's understanding of the relationship between the unseen particles science understood so well and the unruliness of the
world that confronts us every day. Sitting in his small office, with its pictures of the particles he had discovered hanging on
the walls like family portraits, he would look out at the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, at all this rich biology and geology
begging to be understood. And, though some of his Santa Fe colleagues would beg to differ, he believed he had come
close to figuring it out.
Read an Excerpt
Excerpted from Strange Beauty by George Johnson. Copyrightc 1999 by George Johnson. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
The story flows from the pages with the elegance and finesse of a fine
novel...Strange Beauty is a masterpiece of modern biography.
George Johnson has nailed this biography of the brilliant and irascible
Murray Gell-Mann. Strange Beauty is complex, mind-expanding,
beautiful, and true.What People are Saying About This
Roger Lewin
Table of Contents
Prologue: On the Trail to La Vega
Chapter 1: A Hyphenated American
Chapter 2: The Walking Encyclopedia
Chapter 3: A Feeling for the Mechanism
Chapter 4: Village of the Demigods
Chapter 5: The Magic Memory
Chapter 6: 'No Excellent Beauty'
Chapter 7: A Lop-Sided Universe
Chapter 8: Field of Dreams
Chapter 9: The Magic Eightball
Chapter 10. Holy Trinities
Chapter 11. Aces and Quarks
Chapter 12. The Swedish Prize
Chapter 13. Quantum Chromodynamics
Chapter 14. Superphysics
Chapter 15. From the Simple to the Complex
Chapter 16. The Quark and the Jaguar
Epilogue. Valentine's Day, 1997
Glossary
Sources and Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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