Murray Gell-Mann

Murray Gell-Mann, my candidate for the greatest living physicist, recently celebrated his 80th birthday. He was the most prominent particle physicist in the heroic age of particle physics, and he produced a fabulous stream of crucial ideas. Lubos Motl and Peter Woit have each produced long posts on his career, and I strongly recommend them.

In addition to being a great physicist and a genuine polymath, Gell-Mann was a difficult and prickly individual, compulsively rude and obnoxious in that "I'm smarter than you are" way that is so much more annoying because you know that he really is. That didn't stop him from having lots of loyal friends, so he doubtless had compensatory good qualities - but it did make him lots of enemies.

His long rivalry with his fellow Caltech professor Richard Feynman seems to have cost him some psychic damage. Unlike Feynman, he was no storyteller, and severe insecurity about his writing made it difficult to share his thoughts in writing. Feynman was the one guy he couldn't outsmart, shame, or buffalo. When both were at a colloquium, visiting scientists didn't have a chance - between their juvenile antics and gigantic minds you were a goner.

George Johnson has written an excellent scientific and personal biography of Gell-Mann called Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics. Many of his closest friends say that it captures the "real Murray" - larger than life, faults and all.

Happy birthday Murray!

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