REMEMBERING MURRAY
REMEMBERING MURRAY
Introduction by:
Murray Gell-Mann
September 15, 1929 – May 24, 2019
[ED. NOTE: Upon learning of the death of long-time friend, and colleague Murray Gell-Mann, I posed the question below to the Edgies who knew and/or worked with him. —JB]
Can you tell us a personal story about Murray and yourself (about physics, or not)?
THE REALITY CLUB
Leonard Susskind, George Dyson, Stuart Kauffman, John Brockman, Julian Barbour, Freeman Dyson, Neil Gershenfeld, Paul Davies, Virginia Louise Trimble, Alan Guth, Gino Segre, Sara Lippincott, Emanuel Derman, Jeremy Bernstein, George Johnson, Seth Lloyd, W. Brian Arthur, W. Daniel Hillis, Frank Tipler, Karl Sabbagh, Daniel C. Dennett
[ED. NOTE: For starters, here's a story Murray told about himself when I spent time with him in Santa Fe over Christmas vacation in 2003, excerpted from "The Making of a Physicist" Edge, June 3, 2003—JB]
Uncharacteristically, I discussed my application to Yale with my father, who asked, "What were you thinking of putting down?" I said, "Whatever would be appropriate for archaeology or linguistics, or both, because those are the things I'm most enthusiastic about. I'm also interested in natural history and exploration."
He said, "You'll starve!"
After all, this was 1944 and his experiences with the Depression were still quite fresh in his mind; we were still living in genteel poverty. He could have quit his job as the vault custodian in a bank and taken a position during the war that would have utilized his talents — his skill in mathematics, for example — but he didn't want to take the risk of changing jobs. He felt that after the war he would regret it, so he stayed where he was. This meant that we really didn't have any spare money at all.
I asked him, "What would you suggest?"
He mentioned engineering, to which I replied, "I'd rather starve. If I designed anything it would fall apart." And sure enough when I took an aptitude test a year later I was advised to take up nearly anything but engineering."
Then my father suggested, "Why don't we compromise — on physics?"
Introduction
By Geoffrey West
Murray Gell-Mann was one of the great scientists of the 20th century, one of its few renaissance people and a true polymath. He is best known for his seminal contributions to fundamental physics, for helping to bring order and symmetry to the apparently chaotic world of the elementary particles and the fundamental forces of nature. He dominated the field from the early ‘50s, when he was still in his twenties, up through the late ‘70s. Basically, he ran the show. By modern standards he didn’t publish a lot, but when he did we all hung on every word. It is an amazing litany of accomplishments: strangeness, the renormalization group, color and quantum chromodynamics, and of course, quarks and SU(3), for which he won the Nobel prize in 1969.
He was the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, a cofounder of the Santa Fe Institute, where he was a Distinguished Fellow; a former director of the J.D. and C.T. MacArthur Foundation; one of the Global Five Hundred honored by the U.N. Environment Program; a former Citizen Regent of the Smithsonian Institution; a former member of the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology; and the author of The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex.
Despite his extraordinary contributions to high-energy physics, Murray maintained throughout his life an enduring passion for understanding how the messy world of culture, economies, ecologies and human interaction, and especially language, evolved from the beautifully ordered world of the fundamental laws of nature. How did complexity evolve from simplicity? Can we develop a generic science of complex adaptive systems? In the ‘80s he helped found the Santa Fe Institute as a hub on the academic landscape for addressing such vexing questions in a radically transdisciplinary environment.
Murray Gell-Mann knew, understood and was interested in everything, spoke every language on the planet, and probably those on other planets too, and was not shy in letting you know that he did. He was infamous not just for correcting your facts or your logic, but most annoyingly to some, for correcting how you should pronounce your name, your place of birth, or whatever. Luckily my name is West but that never stopped him from lecturing me many times on the Somerset dialect that I spoke as a young child.
Although he decidedly did not suffer fools and would harshly, sometimes almost cruelly, criticize sloppy thinking or incorrect factual statements, he would intensely engage with anyone regardless of their status or standing if he felt they had something to contribute. I rarely felt comfortable when discussing anything with him, whether a question of physics or lending him money, expecting to be clobbered at any moment because I had made some stupid comment or pronounced something wrong.
Murray could be a very difficult man…but what a mind! However, he loved to collaborate, to discuss ideas, and was amazingly open and inclusive even if he did dominate the proceedings. By the time we had become colleagues at SFI, I had become less and less sensitive to the master’s anticipated criticism or even to his occasional praise; the potential trepidation had pretty much disappeared and our relationship had evolved into friendship and collegiality, just in time for me to become his boss. Negotiating with Murray over a perplexing physics question is one thing, but try negotiating with him over salary and secretarial support, then you’ll really see him in action. To quote Hamlet: "He was a man. Take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again."
GEOFFREY WEST is a theoretical physcicist; Shannan Distinguished Professor and Past President, Santa Fe Institute; Author, Scale. Geoffrey West's Edge Bio page.
Reality Club Discussion
Editor, Edge.org; Chairman of Brockman, Inc.; Author, By the Late John Brockman, The Third Culture
Dim-Sum with Murray
"I'm talking about the hooking of minds together, and the hooking of minds and computers together, as well as the evolution of complex adaptive systems elsewhere in the universe, which we don't know about here on earth."
"Anything you say, Murray," I reply, as I guzzle down another dumpling at Harbor House Restaurant in Monterey Park, California. It's Sunday morning and I am having Dim-Sum with physicist and Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann. We are sitting in the midst of about 300 Chinese people, none of whom appears to speak English. This does not deter Murray, who knows smatterings of dozens of languages (including dialects) and is ready to supply an etymological discourse on each of them.
Murray, one of the world's pre-eminent theoretical physicists, discovered the quark, a fundamental building block of the universe. When Murray talks, you listen. And listen. We are discussing the sciences of complexity. "This is how we will reach an understanding of the way the universe works," he says between bites of his spring roll, "from the structure of the galaxies to the generation of a creative thought in the human mind, from prebiotic evolution to the rise and fall of prehistoric societies. Formulating the physical laws of the universe is only the beginning of what we need to know about our world and ourselves. What if we know these laws? What comes next?"
Murray has coined the word "plectics" to describe the next step. "Plectics," he explains, "comes from the Greek word meaning 'twisted' or 'braided.' Thus 'symplectic' comes from the expression meaning 'braided together."'
"The cognate Latin word plexus, 'braided,"' he goes on, "gives rise to 'complex,' originally 'braided together.' The related Latin verb plicare, meaning 'to fold,' is connected with simplex, originally 'once-folded,' which gives rise to 'simple."'
Murray hands me a single sheet of paper which proposes a definition for this new science. I read it as he finishes his spare ribs: "Plectics is the study of simplicity and complexity. It includes the various attempts to define complexity; the study of simplicity and complexity and classical and quantum information in the history of the universe; the physics of information; the study of nonlinear dynamics, including chaos, strange attractors, and self-similarity, in complex 'non-adaptive' systems in physical science; the study of adaptive complex systems, including pre-biotic chemical evolution, biological evolution, ecosystems, mammalian immune systems, learning and thinking, the evolution of human languages, and the rise and fall of human cultures; and the study of computers that, in their architecture or programming or both, have some of the features of 'natural' adaptive complex systems."
This resonates with the agenda of the Santa Fe Institute, which Murray co-founded. The Institute, a unique hot spot on the intellectual landscape, gathers together mathematicians, physicists, chemists, anthropologists, linguists, economists, biologists, and computer scientists, among others. The emphasis is on interactive people. Murray has found that many distinguished people yearn to stray outside their own fields but cannot do it at their own institutions. "We didn't want to locate the Institute near Harvard or MIT," he says, "where there's enormous pressure of received ideas, what the French call 'idées reçues,' ideas that are accepted by a community and that are then difficult to challenge. In Santa Fe, we can think and converse freely, constrained only by the need to agree with reality."
We continue eating as Murray negotiates his way through the menu and our meal in two Chinese dialects with the non-English speaking staff, talking to me at the same time about elementary particles, linguistics, bird watching, archeology, and Chinese food. Dim Sum with Murray is a dizzying, intellectual tour de force. I sit back, stuffed. It doesn't get any better than this.
"The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night," Murray says as we get up to leave. He is quoting his friend, poet Arthur Sze. "If we want to see and understand the jaguar circling in the night," Murray continues, "what are we to do? The major insight here is that information about the universe is compressed into models or schemata by complex adaptive systems, systems that evolve or learn through interaction with their environment. The theory of complex adaptive systems, towards which we are now beginning to work, should apply to all such systems, wherever they occur in the universe. They are a crucial link between the fundamental physical laws, with their universality and simplicity, and the rich fabric of the universe as it appears, say, in a tropical forest on the earth where the jaguar stalks its prey."
Felix Bloch Professor in Theoretical Physics, Stanford; Author, The Theoretical Minimum series
I'll tell the story about how I first got some credit for string theory.
The already legendary Murray Gell-Mann gave a talk in Coral Gables at a big conference, and I was there. His talk had nothing to do with these things. After his talk we both went back to the motel, which had several stories to it. We got on the elevator, and sure enough the elevator got stuck with only me and Murray on it.
Murray says to me, "What do you do?"
So I said, "I'm working on this theory that hadrons are like rubber bands, these one-dimensional stringy things."
And he starts to laugh...and laugh. And I start too feel like, well, my grandmother used to say, "poopwasser."
I was so crushed by the great man's comments that I couldn't continue the conversation, so I said, "What are you working on, Murray?" And of course he said, "Didn't you hear my lecture?" Fortunately at that point the elevator started to go.
I didn't see Murray again for two years. Then, there was a very big conference at FermiLab, and a thousand people were there. And me, I'm still a relative nobody. And Murray is in constant competition with his colleague Richard Feynman over who is the world's greatest physicist.
As I'm standing there talking to a group of my friends, Murray walks by and in an instant turns my career and my life around.
He interrupts the conversation, and, in front of all my friends and closest colleagues, says "I want to apologize to you." I didn't know he remembered me, so I said, "What for?" He said, "For laughing at you in the elevator that time. The stuff you're doing is the greatest stuff in the world. It's just absolutely fantastic, and in my concluding talk at the conference I'm going to talk about nothing but your stuff. We've got to sit down during the conference and talk about it. You've got to explain it to me carefully so that I get it right."
Something unimaginable had just happened to me and I was suddenly on a cloud. So for the next three or four days at the conference, I trailed Murray around, and I would say, "Now, Murray?" And Murray would say, "No, I have to talk to somebody important."
At some point there was a long line at the conference for people trying to talk to the travel agent. I was going to go to Israel and I had to change my ticket. It took about 45 minutes to get to the front of the line, and when I'm two people from the front of the line, you can imagine what happened. Murray comes over and plucks me out of the line and says, "Now I want to talk. Let's talk now." Of course, I was not going to turn Murray down, so I say, "Okay, let's talk," and he says, "I have 15 minutes. Can you explain to me in 15 minutes what this is all about?" I said okay, and we sat down, and for 14 minutes we played a little game: He says to me, "Can you explain it to me in terms of quantum field theory?" And I said, "Okay, I'll try. I'll explain it to you in terms of partons." Around 1968 Feynman proposed that protons, neutrons, and hadrons, were made of little point particles. He didn't know very much about them, but he could see in the data, correctly, that there were elements that made you think that a proton was made up out of little point particles. When you scatter protons off electrons, electrons come out. When you look at the rubbish that comes out, it tends to look as if you've struck a whole bunch of little tiny dots. Those he called partons. He didn't know what they were. That was just his name for them. Parts of protons.
Now you have to understand how competitive Murray and Dick Feynman were. So Murray says to me, "Partons? Partons? Putons! Putons! You're putting me on!" And I thought, "What's going on here?" I had really said the wrong word. And finally he says, "What do these partons have?" I said, "Well, they have momentum. They have an electric charge." And he says, "Do they have SU(3)?" SU(3) was just a property of particles, like the electric charge is a property, or like their spin. Another property was their SU(3)-ness, which is a property that distinguishes proton from neutron. It's the thing that distinguished different particles which are otherwise very similar. Murray Gell-Mann and Yuval Ne'eman had discovered it in the early '60s, and it was what Murray became most famous for, and it led directly to the quark idea. I said, "Yeah, they can have SU-3," and he says, "Oh, you mean a quark!" So for 15 minutes he had played this power game with me. He wanted me to say quark, which was his idea, and not partons, which was Dick's idea. Fourteen of the 15 minutes had gone by, and he lets me start talking, and I explained to him everything in one minute, and he looks at his watch and says, "Excuse me, but I have to talk to somebody important."
So I'm on a rollercoaster. I had gone up, down, up, down, and now I'm really down. I thought to myself, "Murray didn't understand a word I said. He's not interested. He's not going to spend his time in his lecture talking about my work," and then off in a corner somewhere I hear Murray holding forth to about 15 people, and he's just spouting everything I told him and giving me all the credit I could hope for: "Susskind says this. Susskind says that. We have to listen to Susskind". And indeed, his talk at the end of the conference was all "Susskind this, Susskind that". And that was the start of my career. I owe Murray a lot. He's is a man of tremendous integrity, and he cares about the truth, and he certainly has an interesting personality.
It turned out over lunch at The Greasy (Chandler Dining Hall) at Caltech many years ago that he was the only person around (or indeed the only person I ever met apart from my father) who remembered the names of both actresses who played Alec Guiness's wives in Captain's Paradise.
Cosmologist; Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics, MIT; Inaugural Recipient, Fundamental Physics Prize; Author, The Inflationary Universe
[Alan Guth (with help from Jenny Guth):] One of my favorite stories about Murray Gell-Mann comes from my daughter, Jenny Guth, who in the summer of 2006 was a student of theoretical neuroscience, attending a summer program for undergraduates at the Santa Fe Institute. Murray had apparently seen Jenny's name on a list of visiting students and identified her as my daughter. He approached her one day and began a conversation with the surprising comment "I know your grandfather." It turned out that Murray had always assumed—I suppose because Guth is not too common a name—that I was the son of Eugene Guth, a theoretical physicist who made important contributions to polymer, nuclear, and solid state physics from the 1930's through the 1960's. But it isn't true.
Jenny was somewhat startled and was trying to figure out what Murray was talking about. Her actual grandfather, Hyman Guth, was not a physicist; he was the owner of a small dry cleaners in New Brunswick, New Jersey. "How do you know my grandfather," she tried to ask. "I've known Eugene Guth for many years," Murray replied, giving the name an authentic Hungarian pronunciation that made it difficult for Americans to recognize. "But that's not my grandfather," Jenny tried to interject, but Murray had gone into a monologue that could not be slowed down. He had apparently expected her not to recognize the name, due to the correctness of his pronunciation. He continued with a lecture about how Jenny should learn how her grandfather's name was properly pronounced, and how she should be proud of her Hungarian roots and learn more about them. Try as she did, Jenny could not get in a word.
It is not completely clear how this conversation ended, but apparently Jenny was eventually able to cause Murray to realize that there might be a flaw in his theory about the Guth family connections. But Murray was not the kind of person to dwell on his mistakes—or even discuss them—so he quietly walked away and did not bring up the subject again.
Professor of Physics & Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania; Author, The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age
One of the last times I saw Murray was at a 2007 memorial for MIT’s Francis Low, Murray’s friend and collaborator. In the evening many of us gathered at Bob Jaffe’s house to reminisce informally. At one point the conversation turned to Francis’ love of music (he was an accomplished pianist and sometime composer). All of us had by then consumed a few drinks and a few of us tried singing at least a few bars of songs we knew. Perhaps trying to show off and confident Murray would not criticize my Italian, I started out on “La ci darem la mano” from Don Giovanni. Murray and others enthusiastically joined. After we finished Murray commented that he preferred the aria’s German version. He then proceeded to sing it flawlessly. It was a repeat of a lesson I had already learned many times. Never try to be one up on Murray.
Theoretical physicist; cosmologist; astro-biologist; co-Director of BEYOND, Arizona State University; principle investigator, Center for the Convergence of Physical Sciences and Cancer Biology; Author, The Eerie Silence and The Cosmic Jackpot
The date was August 8, 1988. Murray and I were attending a physics meeting in Perth, Australia. Lectures were held in the main auditorium of the University of Western Australia: The Octagon Theatre. Murray was due to give a lecture that day, but John Schwarz, the string theorist, had some sort of conflict, so Murray graciously agreed to switch his talk with John's, scheduled for the following day. John began by thanking Murray, and then expressing his amazement that the architect of 'the Eightfold Way' would pass up the opportunity to lecture on it in an eight-sided auditorium on 8/8/88!
I first met Murray some thirty-five years ago, on a vacation to Pasadena. I was beginning to think of myself as a lay physicist from working at The New Yorker on Jeremy Bernstein’s physics Profiles. When Jeremy heard I’d be in Pasadena, he said, “You must look up Murray Gell-Mann,” whom he had worked with in Paris in the early 1960s. Ignoring the analogy between this remark and the suggestion to someone bound for Rome that she give the Pope a call, I telephoned Murray and invited him to a cocktail party. He couldn’t make it but invited me to lunch at the Athenaeum, Caltech’s magnificent faculty club.
There we lunched on the terrace for two hours, during which time Murray talked, non-stop, about (among other things) the counterintuitiveness of quantum mechanics, the conservation of parity (I think), and SU3 Lie algebra—unaware of, or unconcerned with, the staggering mathlessness of his guest.
So engrossed was he that he had the soup twice. When I got back to The New Yorker and told Jeremy about our meeting, all he said was, “Sara, there are people who would have paid a thousand dollars to have lunch with Murray Gell-Mann. And on you, it was wasted!” I think not. What I clearly remember from that lunch, besides the soup thing, was his advice not to worry about reality (this must have been in connection with QM): “Reality doesn’t exist,” he said. “It isn’t important.” That made an impression, and it has continued to guide me through life ever since.
[Footnote to History. A conversation with Murray Gell-Mann, Aspen, Colorado, August 10, 2004:]
[MURRAY GELL-MANN:] "I was at the University of Illinois in the summer of 1951, in connection with designing an air defense system for Korea during the Korean War. One of the ancillary projects, assigned to Keith Brueckner and me, was to imagine that we had very, very bad computer parts. And we were to make a very reliable computer out of it. Suppose that each part has a 51% probability of being right and a 49% probability of being wrong in this logical operation. How do you get a computer that is reliable? And so we picked a majority voter, and we fed that impulse, three at a time, into another unit, and so on, so that the signal was gradually improved. The project hired various consultants, included Johnny von Neumann for one day. He loved driving across the country, and he liked to think about problems while driving. So he was driving to Los Alamos to work on thermonuclear weapon ideas, and on the way he stopped in Urbana for a day and consulted for us. God knows what they had to pay him. We showed him the problem and he did some quick calculations, he used the cubic equation for the majority voter, and he solved the cubic equation practically in his head, and so on, but it didn’t advance our knowledge very far, except that he said he thought it could be done exponentially, and then he left. And then at Caltech, a year later, he gave a series of lectures [“Probabilistic Logics and the Synthesis of Reliable Organisms From Unreliable Components,” California Institute of Technology, January 4-15, 1952] which was later printed [in Automata Studies, 1956] and he mentioned this problem and said ‘I thank Keith A. Brueckner and Murray Gell-Mann,’ spelling the name right, ‘for telling me about the majority voters.’ Not about the problem, but about the majority voters. But I wasn’t upset at all, at the time. I thought, my God, this great man is referring to me, in the footnote. I’m in the footnote!"
I can write about Gell-Mann only as a distant observer of a natural wonder. I first heard about him and the Eightfold Way as an undergraduate in a summer course in the early 1960s in Cape Town. I heard him speak at multiple seminars and conferences in the 1970s, punctiliously pronouncing the Polish surname of the physicist Roman Jackiw as Yatz-kiv. When I visited Santa Fe for a month in 2012 I was invited to a small dinner he attended to which he brought along a giant bottle of 1955 Chateau Latour Pauillac from his cellar. It was incredibly gentle and really did change in taste through the evening. I’ve never before or since had anything like it. A few days later, part of a political discussion, I said I wasn’t going to vote again for Obama because of the (wrong) people he had appointed after the financial crisis. To which Gell-Mann acidly replied: You mean you’re not going to vote for him because he’s not perfect?
Murray Gell-Mann had a legendary memory, a small example of which is all I can contribute in the way of a reminiscence. Recalling the details has made me acutely aware, of how well, for me at least, visual and episodic memory holds up as opposed to that for names.
There were only two occasions when I met Murray. The first was at the 1991 conference Physical Origins of Time Asymmetry held in Spain at the port city Huelva (from which Columbus set sail in 1492). Stephen Hawking was among the participants, which generated huge interest in the Spanish media. Something about me seems to have lodged in Murray's capacious memory. This may have been because, as an independent researcher, I was the only participant with a private address or because I achieved a certain notoriety at the conference by holding a straw pole among the attendees on whether or not they believed "time to be a truly basic concept that must appear in the foundations of any theory of the world". This led to a bit of a rumpus because the answers given by the various attendees were leaked (not by me) to the media. On the Saturday after the conference, Bryce DeWitt was not amused to find, over breakfast in his hotel in Madrid, all the details (including his vote) in a big article in El Pais.
The second time that I met Murray was at a rather strange conference in Abu Dhabi about 15 years later attended by 18 Nobel Laureates, who had each proposed two so-called World Thinkers as further attendees. Kary Mullis (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1993) had read my book The End of Time and wanted to meet me. That is how I got there. Buzz Aldrin also attended. It's not surprising I remember well looking up at the full moon with him and asking what it had been like to walk on moon dust.
Kary and his wife organized a small dinner party in a private room (so that alcohol could be served) to which he invited Murray, Buzz and his wife, and three or four others including me. On the way there, I remember Kary's wife being concerned whether Buzz would find the room, to which the answer was "If he found his way to the [expletive deleted] moon, he'll find that room." He did.
After all this preamble, here's the bit about Murray's memory. I don't know if it was before or after the dinner, but having the need to visit the men's room I chanced to be standing at the urinal next to Murray when he enquired "Is it in Stoke Newington you live Julian?" That's pretty good recall. Stoke Newington, now an area in north London, was once a village. I live in South Newington, a village about 20 miles north of Oxford.
If, as I have heard, Murray was beginning to succumb to dementia in his final years, it's particularly poignant.
Professor Emeritus, Stevens Institute of Technology; Former Staff Writer, The New Yorker
In 1958 I attended a conference on weak interactions in Gatlinburg Tennessee Both Feynman and Gell-Mann were there. At one lunch a number of us sat at a long table with Feynman at the head. Murray came over and began lecturing Feynman as if he was some sort of graduate student. Feynman looked bemused and after Murray left he said, “He is not used to talking to people who are as smart as he is.”
Professor of Biological Sciences, Physics, Astronomy, University of Calgary; Author, Reinventing the Sacred
I admired him so much. I wish we had been friends. I have a final Murray story to tell you. About a year ago, I wrote Murray a short letter. I don’t think he got it. Somewhat later we were both at SFI and I went to him and told him the letter: "Murray, I just want you to know how much I admire you. In past years I often argued with you. You were the silver backed gorilla on the log and I wanted to knock you off. I never succeeded! Fondly, Stu.” Murray listened then said, “I didn’t know there was a contest.” That was perfect Murray.
He was amazing.
Author; The Cancer Chronicles, The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments; Columnist, The New York Times
In the late 1990s as I was almost finished writing Strange Beauty, my biography of Murray Gell-Mann, the filmmaker Celia Lowenstein asked if I would appear in her documentary about him, Simply Complex. By then he and I were no longer on the best of terms. After much consideration and advice from his colleagues, I had declined to let him read my manuscript in advance. He was also pressuring me not to include some things he had told me during our many hours of tape-recorded interviews. Making things still worse, a sepia tone photograph of Murray as a child that I had borrowed for inclusion in the book had, to my horror and his consternation, been damaged by a courier for the photo processing shop.
I can’t remember if that particular event happened before or after Celia arrived in Santa Fe to start filming. But Murray was moody as, camera rolling, he and I hiked up a trail in the foothills above town—my Boswell to his Dr. Johnson—as though this was something we did all the time. At one point, with the microphone turned away, Murray expressed (with grim humor) a wish to shove me off the mountainside.
When Strange Beauty was published in fall 1999, he immediately began denouncing it. He was right that I had made some mistakes, dumb ones and smart ones. I keep an errata sheet on my website where readers of early printings can learn, for example, that it was a new and not a used Chevy that a young Murray bought after Oppenheimer hired him at the Institute for Advanced Study, and that it was the office of Fermi's secretary (not Fermi's own) where Gell-Mann saw a letter that lifted his morale. But you won’t find corrections for things Murray considered errors but were not. For all his insistence otherwise, he did not believe in the reality of quarks when he first conceived of them—an obscure point in the history of science. He was furious that I wouldn’t buy his revisionist account.
On the day my obituary of him appeared in the print edition of the New York Times, I was crestfallen to learn from a reader that I had misstated the law of conservation for a quantum number called strangeness. It was as though Gell-Mann, red pencil in hand, had reached from beyond with a correction.
Murray was as hard on himself as he was on others. In the preface of his own book, The Quark and the Jaguar, he told of a mythical lighthouse keeper occupying long, lonely nights by scouring books, one after another, intent on finding each mistake. “The reader of this volume,” Gell-Mann wrote, “can therefore readily imagine the agonies of embarrassment I am already enduring just through imagining dozens of serious mistakes being found by my friends and colleagues after publication and pointed out, whether gleefully or sorrowfully, to the perfectionist author.”
Physicist, Institute of Advanced Study; Author, Disturbing the Universe; Maker of Patterns
I had a friendly argument with Murray Gell-Mann when he claimed that the strongly interacting particles showed an SU3 symmetry.
He said that there was a symmetrical SU3 decuplet of ten particles with spin 3/2, and predicted that one of them remained to be discovered, a negative particle with strangeness minus 3. I said that was total nonsense because the cross-sections for producing the various particles in high-energy collisions differed by huge factors. I asked him, “How can you say that a set of particles is symmetrical, when they have cross-sections differing by a factor of a million?”
Murray said nothing and I thought I had won the argument. A few weeks later the Omega minus particle was discovered and I knew that Murray had won.
I first met Murray in the summer of 1988, in New Mexico. I had just completed my Ph.D. at Rockefeller University, under the supervision of Heinz Pagels, and had been turned down for every postdoctoral position I’d applied for—since joining Rockefeller in 1984, I had been working on the intersection between quantum mechanics and information theory, a field which the head of the physics department had kindly told me, "was only for crackpots and Nobel laureates who had gone soft in the head." Whether he had gone soft in the head or was merely prescient about the importance of quantum information theory, Murray offered me a postdoctoral position at Caltech.
We met in a corner office in T-division at Los Alamos, and after asking my name, correcting my pronunciation of it, and explaining its etymology, Murray began to talk about quantum mechanics and the nature of coherence and decoherence. At one point, I said something quantum that Murray disagreed with. His first response was "No." Then he put his forehead down on the desk and banged on it with his fists, saying "No no no no no!" Here, I thought, was a man I could work with.
It required patience to work with Murray. He was a perfectionist, and consequently always behind on everything (notably, in writing his book, The Quark and the Jaguar). So, work went slowly: when I thought we had a good result and should publish, Murray would demand that we look at the result again and again from all angles, while years went by. When we were working intently on a problem, and got stuck, Murray liked to bring up obscure points etymology, numismatics, or classical history, which would distract us until Murray would suddenly present a solution to the original problem—part of his brain had been working on it all the time!
Despite his reputation for rudeness to other physicists, I never saw Murray treat younger scientists with anything other than kindness and respect. He fostered the careers of many. If he disagreed with you about science, it was because he cared so deeply about it. My work with Murray focused on trying to make concepts of complexity mathematically precise—a hard problem, because complex systems can be thought of as exactly those that resist any single conceptualization. Murray’s brilliant theoretical illumination had made clear the workings of elementary particles: even as the field he liked to call "plectics" resisted attempts to simplify it, Murray persisted in his efforts. Although the theory of complex systems has yet to attain the profound simplicities revealed in Murray’s "eight-fold way" for the theory of strong interactions, Murray’s co-founding of the Santa Fe Institute made the study of complexity a science.
In his last few years, Murray’s phenomenal memory and encyclopedic knowledge was dimmed by illness, but he still retained his mischievous habits. A few weeks before his death I told him of how I had recently visited the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome, and there had seen Giordano Bruno’s own copy of Copernicus’s great book, which I mistakenly referred to as "De motu orbium coelestium." Murray had been dozing but opened his eyes and said "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium." Of course, he was correct.
Now that I had his attention, I said, "Well, Murray, you’re not so different from Bruno: you both proposed radical ideas, annoyed lots of people, and turned out in the end to be right!" "Yes," said Murray, "but they didn’t burn me at the stake."
Murray taught me the most important lesson I've learned about quantum mechanics (and physics), with the verbal equivalent of a rap on the knuckles.
This was in the early days of quantum computing, when we were working out pulse sequences to manipulate superpositions and entanglement. I was fascinated by the wild interpretations being debated for these measurements: does the universe split into many worlds? does information travel backwards in time? I made the mistake of casually asking Murray what he thought about them, not realizing the trap I was falling into. That's when he blew up at me.
He sputtered (as he did so charmingly) that my attempt at understanding had no place there. Nothing about the construction of our brains or language was appropriate for describing quantum worlds, so I should shut up and trust the math. The interpretations had no bearing on what was calculated, they were just unnecessary baggage hung on after the fact.
That first struck me as a head-in-the-sand approach to the mysteries of the universe, but I've come to appreciate it as the essence of physical theory. "Understanding" is by reference to prior experience, and unless you've spent a lifetime doing quantum calculations (like Murray) your intuition has no place, that's what the formalism is for. Ever since, I channel an inner Murray whenever I try to understand something that I shouldn't.
External Professor, Santa Fe Institute; Visiting Researcher, Intelligent Systems Lab, PARC; Inaugural Recipient, Lagrange Prize; Author, The Nature of Technology
In 1993, at the Santa Fe Institute's second campus by the Old Pecos Trail, Stu Kauffman and I were heading out to lunch one day. In comes Murray Gell-Mann struggling with a large box of books for his office. He had many more in his SUV, and Stuart and I carried them one by one in to his office. Murray beamed and thanked us. "Any time," said Stuart, "for someone like you." Murray looks at Stu with complete innocence. "But there is no one like me," he says.
How true.
Physicist, Computer Scientist, Co-Founder, Applied Invention.; Author, The Pattern on the Stone
The first person to introduce me to Murray Gell-Mann was Richard Feynman. They had offices across from each other at Caltech. Dick often told me stories about his interactions with Murray, and those made me realize that the two of them felt genuinely competitive with each other. As far as I know, Murray was the only one smart enough to make Dick feel competitive. Since I was close to Dick, Murray always considered me a bit suspect, assuming I was on Dick’s side in the competition. So, in those days we were not so close.
Murray did ask me to be on his Science Board at the Santa Fe Institute, where I got to know him independently. Then, when Dick died, there was a memorial service where Murray, Hans Bethe, Freeman Dyson, and I all gave talks about our remembrances. When Murray’s time came, he got up and explained that many of the things that Dick got credit for, he considered to be his own ideas, which kind of annoyed me. But, at the end of the talk, he said, "Still, when I really want to talk about physics, I really miss him," and he began to tear up. That was the moment that I saw another side of Murray, and started to feel closer to him. Somehow, Dick’s death removed the barrier between us.
A year later, I brought a friend by to Murray who had a question about quantum mechanics. Murray gave a very confident answer that I thought was a bit speculative, so I said, "Murray, you don’t KNOW that’s true." Murray looked at me and said very seriously, "You’re right, I really don’t know much about quantum mechanics, I just know more than anyone else in the world." I realized that, now, he might be right about that.
A few weeks before Murray died, a mutual friend visited him and conveyed my regards. Apparently, Murray sighed and said, "I think Danny always liked Dick more than he liked me." Hearing that made me sad. There was a kind of sweetness in him that he didn’t let many people see. The truth was, he really cared about people and what they thought of him, more than he liked to let on.
Professor of Mathematical Physics, Tulane University; Coauthor (with John Barrow), The Anthropic Cosmological Principle
I only met Murray Gell-Mann once, at a conference at Fermilab. We talked about the difficulty young physicists had getting their papers published, particularly those with radically new ideas. Gell-Mann agreed, but told me that this was not a new problem. He said—with a touch of outrage in his voice—that he himself had a great deal of difficulty getting his 1954 paper with F. Low on the renormalization group published in Physical Review, the leading American physics journal.
My jaw dropped. Murray Gell-Mann having trouble with referees? I regarded Gell-Mann as in the same category as Albert Einstein: even when he's wrong, he's wrong in an interesting way, well worth reading. But then Physical Review once rejected a paper by Einstein on relativity.
The renormalization group paper having difficulties? This was one of Gell-Mann's most important papers. Ever since, I've wondered if Gell-Mann's difficulty publishing this paper led him to never publish, in any referred journal, his breakthrough paper on the Eight-fold Way. The reference has always been Cal-Tech Report CTSL-20 (1961).
Producer; Founder, Managing Director, Skyscraper Productions; Author, The Antisemitism Wars: How the British Media Failed Their Public
I met Murray a few times over the space of twenty years. When we first met, I had dropped in on him after visiting Feynman, who had an office nearby. As everyone knows, there was no love lost between them. "Why does that man always get the visits from TV producers?" he said. "Now it’s your turn," I said, and we discussed a possible TV series based on The Quark and the Jaguar. It never happened, of course.
A year or so later, we continued our discussions at his home in Santa Fe where I was astonished to discover that he had a large collection of Palestinian coins, (my father was Palestinian) and that he spoke Arabic among many other languages. "You know what your name means?" he said, "Dyer." I said I did.
The next time I saw him, perhaps fifteen years later, he came up to me and said "Ah, Mr. Dyer." Even though his dementia was showing, we had a very enjoyable dinner, along with a female researcher I was with, and his attempt to kiss my colleague goodbye showed that his mental condition had not diminished at all his fondness for women.
Philosopher; Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University; Author, From Bacteria to Bach and Back
Others have mentioned Murray’s delight in dazzling one and all with his knowledge of languages, and I often listened in silent fascination as he held forth on one arcane fact of historical linguistics or another, but one time his penchant for delivering les mots justes gave me a golden opportunity to reciprocate. We were at a conference on evolution and I was wearing the lapel pin that looks like a standard Christian fish until you get up close and see that it has legs and says DARWIN on it. Murray came up to me and said "Dan, I like your DARWIN-fish," and proceeded to tell me about how the Christian fish symbol was based on the first known acronym: "ichthys" is Greek for "fish" and the letters stand for Jesus Christ Son of God and Savior.
ΙΧΘYΣ
Ιησονς Χριστος Θεον Υιος Σωτηρ
Jesus Christ God Son [of] Savior
He went on: "What I want to know is: what does "D-A-R-W-I-N" stand for?" It was a challenge I couldn’t resist. I said I’d think about it over a cup of coffee and try to give him an answer. Dredging up fragments of my 60-years-ago high school Latin (some old readers may remember Cato’s "Carthago delenda est"—Carthage must be destroyed), I hit upon a lucky win, which I reported to him a little later that day. There is no W in Latin, but there is U, so double-U is available:
Delere
Auctorem
Rerum
Ut Universum
Infinitum
Noscas.
Destroy the author of things in order to understand the infinite universe.
Murray graciously acknowledged that it works very well, and I’ve savored that verdict ever since. Murray’s conversational gambits were intended more to unsettle than to impress, setting puzzles and challenges to provoke imagination.
