[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!"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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!

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.

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.