Murray Gell-Mann facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Murray Gell-Mann
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Gell-Mann in 2007
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| Born | September 15, 1929 Manhattan, New York City, U.S.
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| Died | May 24, 2019 (aged 89) Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S.
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J. Margaret Dow
(m. 1955; died 1981)Marcia Southwick
(m. 1992) |
| Children | 2 |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics |
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| Thesis | Coupling strength and nuclear reactions (1951) |
| Doctoral advisor | Victor Weisskopf |
| Doctoral students |
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Murray Gell-Mann (born September 15, 1929 – died May 24, 2019) was an American physicist. He won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics. This award was for his important work on tiny particles called elementary particles.
Gell-Mann was a professor at the California Institute of Technology. He also helped start the Santa Fe Institute. This is a research center for studying complex systems. He also taught at the University of New Mexico and the University of Southern California. He spent time at CERN, a big science lab in Switzerland.
Contents
Early Life and Education
Murray Gell-Mann was born in Manhattan, New York City. His family were Jewish immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father taught English as a second language.
Murray was very curious about nature and math. He finished high school at age 14. He was the best student in his class. Then he went to Yale University. He studied physics there.
He earned his bachelor's degree in physics from Yale in 1948. He wanted to continue studying physics. He applied to top universities like Princeton University and Harvard University. He was accepted by Harvard but needed financial help.
He then got into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His future advisor, Victor Weisskopf, offered him a research assistant job. This helped him pay for his studies. Murray earned his PhD in physics from MIT in 1951. His main project was about "Coupling strength and nuclear reactions."
Discoveries in Physics
After MIT, Gell-Mann worked at several universities. These included the Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He also taught at Columbia University and the University of Chicago. In 1955, he joined the California Institute of Technology. He taught there until he retired in 1993.
Understanding Weak Interactions
In 1958, Murray Gell-Mann worked with Richard Feynman. They studied the "weak interaction" in physics. This is one of the basic forces of nature. They developed the V-A theory. This theory helped explain how certain particles interact. Their work was important after scientists found that "parity" was violated. Parity is a symmetry rule in physics.
Classifying Particles: The Eightfold Way
In the 1950s, new particles from cosmic rays were found. These were called kaons and hyperons. Gell-Mann helped classify them. He suggested a new property called "strangeness." This property is kept the same in strong and electromagnetic interactions. But it can change in weak interactions.
In 1961, Gell-Mann created a way to group hadrons. Hadrons are particles like protons and neutrons. He called this system the eightfold way. It was named after the "Eightfold Path" in Buddhism. This was because particles were grouped into "octets" (groups of eight).
Introducing Quarks
In 1964, Gell-Mann had a big idea. He suggested that hadrons are made of even smaller particles. He called these particles quarks. The name "quark" came from a line in a book called Finnegans Wake. Another scientist, George Zweig, had a similar idea. He called them "aces." But Gell-Mann's name, "quark," became famous.
Quarks, along with other particles called antiquarks and gluons, are the basic building blocks of hadrons. For his work on classifying elementary particles, Gell-Mann received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969.
In the 1960s, he also developed "current algebra." This method helped predict how quarks behave. It was a key step in creating the Standard Model of particle physics. The Standard Model is the main theory that describes elementary particles.
In 1972, Gell-Mann and his colleagues introduced "color charge." This is another property of quarks. Later, they named the theory that describes the strong force between quarks "quantum chromodynamics" (QCD). The quark model is a part of QCD. It has been very successful in explaining new discoveries in particle physics.
Gell-Mann also helped develop the "seesaw theory" for neutrino masses. Neutrinos are very light particles. This theory explains why they have such tiny masses. He also supported string theory when it was a new idea. String theory tries to explain all forces and particles using tiny vibrating strings.
Complexity Science and Writing
Later in his career, Gell-Mann became interested in complexity science. This field studies systems with many interacting parts. He was a co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute. This institute focuses on researching complex systems.
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He wrote a popular science book called The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex (1994). The book's title comes from a poem. It talks about how the world of tiny quarks is connected to big things like a jaguar.
A writer named George Johnson wrote a book about Gell-Mann's life. It was called Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann, and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics (1999). Many scientists praised the book.
Personal Life
Murray Gell-Mann married J. Margaret Dow in 1955. They had a daughter and a son. Margaret passed away in 1981. In 1992, he married Marcia Southwick.
Outside of physics, Gell-Mann had many hobbies. He enjoyed archaeology (studying old cultures) and numismatics (collecting coins). He also loved birdwatching and linguistics (the study of language). He helped start a project to study how human languages evolved. He was also a humanist and an agnostic.
Murray Gell-Mann died on May 24, 2019, at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Awards and Honors
Gell-Mann received many awards and honors for his work.
- 1959 – Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics
- 1960 – Elected member of the National Academy of Sciences
- 1962 – American Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award
- 1964 – Elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- 1966 – Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award
- 1967 – Franklin Medal
- 1968 – National Academy of Sciences – John J. Carty Award
- 1969 – Research Corporation Award
- 1969 – Nobel Prize in Physics
- 1978 – Elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS)
- 1988 – United Nations Environment Programme Roll of Honor for Environmental Achievement (The Global 500)
- 1993 – Elected member of The American Philosophical Society
- 2005 – Albert Einstein Medal
- 2005 – American Humanist Association – Humanist of the Year
- 2014 – Helmholtz-Medal of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities
He also received honorary doctorates from many universities. These included Cambridge, Columbia, Oxford, and Yale.
See also
In Spanish: Murray Gell-Mann para niños
- Complex adaptive system
- Gell-Mann amnesia effect
- Kaon
- Non-linear sigma model
- Omega baryon
- Pseudoscalar meson
- Random phase approximation
