1. Murray Gell-Mann was an American theoretical physicist who played a preeminent role in the development of the theory of elementary particles.
23 Facts About Murray Gell-Mann
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Murray Gell-Mann played key roles in developing the concept of chirality in the theory of the weak interactions and spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in the strong interactions, which controls the physics of the light mesons.
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Murray Gell-Mann received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles.
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Murray 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.
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Murray Gell-Mann's parents were Pauline and Arthur Isidore Gelman, who taught English as a second language.
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Murray Gell-Mann graduated from Yale with a bachelor's degree in physics in 1948 and intended to pursue graduate studies in physics.
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Murray Gell-Mann sought to remain in the Ivy League for his graduate education and applied to Princeton University as well as Harvard University.
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Murray Gell-Mann was rejected by Princeton and accepted by Harvard, but the latter institution was unable to offer him needed financial assistance.
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Murray Gell-Mann was accepted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received a letter from Victor Weisskopf urging him to attend MIT and become Weisskopf's research assistant.
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Unaware of MIT's eminent status in physics research, Murray Gell-Mann was "miserable" with the fact that he would not be able to attend Princeton or Harvard and in characteristic dark irony, said he considered suicide.
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Murray Gell-Mann stated that he realized he could try to first enter MIT and commit suicide afterwards if he found it to be truly terrible.
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In 2011, Murray Gell-Mann attended an event on Jeffrey Epstein's private island, Little Saint James, known as the "Mindshift Conference", hosted by Epstein and Al Seckel.
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Murray Gell-Mann died on May 24,2019, at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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Murray Gell-Mann was the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at California Institute of Technology as well as a university professor in the physics and astronomy department of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine at the University of Southern California.
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Murray Gell-Mann spent several periods at CERN, a nuclear research facility in Switzerland, among others as a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellow in 1972.
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Murray Gell-Mann wrote a popular science book about physics and complexity science, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex.
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Murray Gell-Mann referred to the scheme as the eightfold way, because of the octets of particles in the classification.
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The name "quark" was coined by Murray Gell-Mann, and is a reference to the novel Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce.
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Zweig had referred to the particles as "aces", but Murray Gell-Mann's name caught on.
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Murray Gell-Mann was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969 for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions.
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Murray Gell-Mann was responsible, with Pierre Ramond and Richard Slansky, and independently of Peter Minkowski, Rabindra Mohapatra, Goran Senjanovic, Sheldon Glashow, and Tsutomu Yanagida, for proposing the seesaw theory of neutrino masses.
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Murray Gell-Mann is known to have played a role in keeping string theory alive through the 1970s and early 1980s, supporting that line of research at a time when it was a topic of niche interest.
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Murray Gell-Mann was a proponent of the consistent histories approach to understanding quantum mechanics, which he advocated in papers with James Hartle.