Strange Beauty by George Johnson, Jonathan Cape, 拢18.99, ISBN
0224044273
HOW do you become a world-famous scientist? Unlikely as it sounds, writing a
textbook did the trick for Dmitri Mendeleev, who made his name while trying to
sort the elements into order. His periodic table of elements ordered by their
atomic weight revealed underlying patterns. We too have a Mendeleev, Murray
Gell-Mann. Why, then, isn鈥檛 he as famous?
In the early 1960s, Gell-Mann spotted a pattern while looking at the
properties of the scores of known subatomic particles鈥攋ust as, 100 years
before, Mendeleev saw a pattern in the properties of the scores of known atoms.
And, like Mendeleev, Gell-Mann used the pattern to predict the existence of new
entities. In January 1964, the most famous of these鈥攖he omega-minus
particle鈥攚as discovered at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long
Island.
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Indeed, Gell-Mann is far more than a Mendeleev. He鈥檚 a Mendeleev and a Bohr
rolled into one. For like Niels Bohr, who triumphantly explained Mendeelev鈥檚
pattern in terms of a more fundamental constituent of atoms, the electron,
Gell-Mann explained his pattern in terms of a more basic component of subatomic
particles: the quark.
Even if George Zweig independently originated the idea, Gell-Mann is Mr
Quark. So proud is he of his discovery, says his biographer George Johnson in
Strange Beauty, that he drives a Subaru with a registration plate
reading, simply, QUARKS. He is the ultimate reductionist, the heir of
Democritus, the man who lifted the veil that shrouds reality from our senses and
saw beneath it shiny building blocks.
Nor has he gone unlauded. For his discovery of the constituents of protons,
neutrons and all other 鈥渟trongly interacting鈥� particles, Gell-Mann received the
ultimate scientific accolade, the 1969 Nobel Prize for Physics. It should have
made him happy. It hasn鈥檛, according to Johnson. And herein lies the tragedy of
Murray Gell-Mann.
Gell-Mann was an infant prodigy and one of the most important physicists of
the post-war era. Yet in his own eyes, according to Johnson, he believes he has
been less than a success, missing out on further important discoveries about the
properties of quarks such as 鈥渃olour鈥� and 鈥渜uark confinement鈥� because of a
terror of being wrong, of failing to measure up to other great physicists of his
generation.
Richard Feynman鈥擥ell-Mann鈥檚 flamboyant colleague and sparring partner
at Caltech for 30 years鈥攊s chief among these. In the beginning, the two
men sparked off each other, producing a stream of productive ideas. But later
their rivalry led to a gradual falling out.
And Feynman was a formidable, and very visible, rival. According to Johnson,
he carefully honed the anecdotes that made him into a colourful,
larger-than-life character and established him as a popular scientist. You might
not have known exactly what he did for a living, but you鈥檇 know of him from his
bongo playing to his jokey safe-cracking at Los Alamos to show how loose
security was.
We have no such memorable anecdotes to attach to Gell-Mann鈥檚 name. He saw the
manufactured showman in Feynman, says Johnson. Feynman became a best-selling
author, exploiting his light, anecdotal approach to science in Surely,
You鈥檙e Joking, Mr Feynman. Meanwhile Gell-Mann tried, and failed, to
emulate that success with The Quark and the Jaguar.
The rivalry between Feynman and Gell-Mann was, however, principally an
intellectual one. When Feynman declared in his book that only once in his life
had he known a law of nature before anyone else鈥攖he so-called V-A theory
of beta decay, the theory that explains the decay of neutrons into protons.
Gell-Mann objected that he had known the law months before. Feynman removed the
offending reference in the next edition.
Feynman died in 1988, but still casts a long shadow over Gell-Mann. The
magazine Physics World polled 250 leading physicists in its December
1999 issue, asking them to name the top physicist of all time. Feynman received
37 votes and was ranked seventh, between Galileo and Paul Dirac. Gell-Mann
received no votes. This is a great injustice; his scientific stature is much
closer to Feynman鈥檚 than this.
Perhaps it鈥檚 because Gell-Mann鈥檚 interests have always ranged far beyond
physics. He is an ardent birdwatcher and historian. In fact, you name it, and
he鈥檚 an expert on it. He delights in speaking a multitude of languages and has a
fascination with words and their histories. Meet him, says Johnson, and he will
invariably tell you the roots of your name and point out that you are
mispronouncing it鈥攑erhaps not one of his most endearing qualities.
Eventually, Gell-Mann left Caltech. His wide-ranging interests made him a
perfect candidate for the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. It had been set up
in the 1980s to investigate how nature鈥檚 deceptively simple laws manage to
generate a Universe of such bewildering complexity. For the ultimate
reductionist, it proved the ultimate irony. Gell-Mann, who had laid bare the
structure of reality at its most basic level, had to acknowledge that this
structure tells us nothing at all about the workings of a cell, a bee or human
society.
Johnson, an award-winning science writer, paints a fascinating portrait of
this brilliant, complicated, sometimes insecure and often exasperating man.
Puzzled about the book鈥檚 title, Strange Beauty? Well, Gell-Mann
introduced the quantum property of 鈥渟trangeness鈥� to bring order to the subatomic
world. But Johnson is also alluding to the contradictions in Gell-Mann鈥檚
character. For, as Francis Bacon wrote, 鈥淭here is no excellent beauty, that hath
not some strangeness in the proportion.鈥�