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.

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