Strange Beauty

Any physicist or physics fan who hasn't read George Johnson's Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics is missing a great read. Johnson has written a deeply penetrating biography of Murray Gell-Mann - my vote for greatest living physicist. Gell-Mann is an outsized personality as well as a great physicist and genuine polymath.

The reviews in my link above describe him as irrascible, but that seems a bit imprecise. Despite his huge accomplishment, he is clearly gnawed at by deep insecurities that apparently prompt his many faults: jealousies petty and grand, pomposity, pedantry, and an apparently incurable impulse to demean others. The Nobel laureate can't escape the insecure prodigy bent on showing up the big kids.

One great virtue of Johnson's writing is that he can show us the pompous, mean-spirited intellectual bully and still get us to like him.

Especially recommended for younger physicists who know little of the heroic age of particle physics before the triumph of the Standard Model. Gell-Mann's ideas and discoveries played a key role in setting physics up for that triumph. Feynman once said that "there is no important result in particle physics that doesn't have Gell-Mann's name on it." It was typically double-edged Feynman in that inside the genuine praise is a hint at Gell-Mann's habit of tending to claim all the credit for discoveries due in part to others.

A prominent physicist and Gell-Mann friend who reviewed the book reports asking him about it. "There is an error on every page," Gell-Mann replied. Maybe so, said the reviewer, but the stuff Johnson got right was much more important. It showed the world "the real Murray."

Gell-Mann's great rival Feynman was an even more outsized personality, and his combination of aw-shucks manner and charisma (not to mention brilliance) made him a perfect weapon of destruction for Gell-Mann's pretentiousness. Combined, they were a perfect murderer's row for those who dared to present colloquia at Caltech - rude, obnoxious, and oh so unreasonably brilliant.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-Libertarian: re-post

The most pointed critique of social security and liberalism in general is the libertarian critique. The problem with libertarians, for a liberal, is that we have too much in common. We both believe in individual rights, tolerance of individual differences, and dislike government prescription of religion. The basic difference, it seems to me, is the different answers we give to Cain's (with thanks to the Captain - my original version had the corpse asking the question!) famous question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That's not really my basic bitch against the libertarians though. My real complaint is the same as my complaint against most religion - its premise is a fraud. For those who can't stand to wait for the punchline, I believe that trying to implement libertarian principles leads to tyranny or social disintegration. Demonstrating that takes some historical (and pre-historical) context. For all but the last 15,000 or so of the 100,000 years the human spec...
Read more

Uneasy Lies The Head

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown ........... Shakespeare Henry IV, Part II. So it is with us and our slightly distant primate cousins , so it seems. A 9-year study of wild baboons in Kenya by Princeton University and the Institute of Primate Research may turn conventional assumptions of alphas males upside down. The study found that alpha males have high testosterone levels, which allows them to dominate other baboons, get access to more food, and attract better mates. This is expected. Surprisingly, though, the alpha males also have high levels of stress hormone glucocorticoid, which scientists measured from their feces samples. In fact, the stress of alpha baboons was on par with low-ranking baboons. The convention wisdom is that access to food and females provides life security and thus less stress for dominant males. Conversely, weak males who are constantly threatened by starvation and physical violence from stronger males are thought to be more stressed. The st...
Read more

We Call it Soccer

The US played its best, and maybe only good game of World Cup, but lost thanks to brilliant goalkeeping by the Swedish keeper and the bizarre method soccer uses to settle ties when three US stars could not put the ball on frame from the 12 yard spot.  At the end it came down to a blocked shot that spun in by maybe a couple of centimeters. Well, that's football - too much like life.   Which brings me to a modest proposal.  Replace the thirty minute overtimes with as many 7-player 15 minute periods as needed to settle it.  Scoring should be much easier with fewer players.
Read more