With a New Afterword "Our knowledge of fundamental physics contains not one fruitful idea that does not carry the name of Murray Gell-Mann."--Richard Feynman Acclaimed science writer George Johnson brings his formidable reporting skills to the first biography of Nobel Prize-winner Murray Gell-Mann, the brilliant, irascible man who revolutionized modern particle physics with his models of the quark and the Eightfold Way. Born into a Jewish immigrant family on New York's East 14th Street, Gell-Mann's prodigious talent was evident from an early age--he entered Yale at 15, completed his Ph.D. at 21, and was soon identifying the structures of the world's smallest components and illuminating the elegant symmetries of the universe. Beautifully balanced in its portrayal of an extraordinary and difficult man, interpreting the concepts of advanced physics with scrupulous clarity and simplicity, Strange Beauty is a tour-de-force of both science writing and biography.

Murray Gell-Mann is one of the leading physicists in the world. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969 for his work on the SU(3) symmetry. His list of publications, albeit relatively short, is highly impressive — he has written mainly papers, which have become landmarks in physics. In 1953, Gell-Mann introduced the strangeness quantum number. In 1954, he proposed, together with F Low, the idea of the renormalization group. In 1958, Gell-Mann wrote, together with R Feynman, an important paper on the V-A theory of weak interactions. In 1961, Gell-Mann published his ideas on the SU(3) symmetry. In 1964, he proposed the quark model for hadrons. In 1971, Gell-Mann, together with H Fritzsch, proposed the color quantum number; and in 1972, the theory of QCD. These major publications of Gell-Mann are collected in this volume, thus providing physicists with easy access to the important publications of Gell-Mann.

This book provides an explanation of the connections between nature at its most basic level and natural selection, archaeology, linguistics, child development, computers and other complex adaptive systems.

The Conference on Quantum Mechanics, Elementary Particles, Quantum Cosmology and Complexity was held in honour of Professor Murray Gell-Mann's 80th birthday in Singapore on 24?26 February 2010. The conference paid tribute to Professor Gell-Mann's great achievements in the elementary particle physics. This notable birthday volume contains the presentations made at the conference by many eminent scientists, including Nobel laureates C N Yang, G 't Hooft and K Wilson. Other invited speakers include G Zweig, N Samios, M Karliner, G Karl, M Shifman, J Ellis, S Adler and A Zichichi. About Murray Gell-Mann Murray Gell-Mann, born September 15, 1929, won the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. His contributions span the entire history of particle physics, from the early days of the particle zoo to the modern day QCD. Along the way, even as he proposed new quantum numbers to bring order into the zoo, he had fun in naming them. And thus was born Strangeness, Flavor, Hadrons, Baryons, Leptons, the Eightfold Way, Color, Quarks, Gluons and, with Harald Fritzsch, the standard field theory of strong interactions, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). He also proposed with Richard Feynman the V-A theory of beta decay. Gell-Mann discovered the Current Algebra, proposed (with Levy) the sigma model of pions and the see-saw mechanism for the neutrino masses.

This monograph presents thirty research papers dealing with the classification of strongly interacting particles and their interaction according to the eightfold way. In each chapter the authors' commentary introduces the reprints.

From molecules to stars, much of the cosmic canvas can be painted in brushstrokes of primary color: the protons, neutrons, and electrons we know so well. But for meticulous detail, we have to dip into exotic hues—leptons, mesons, hadrons, quarks. Bringing particle physics to life as few authors can, Jeremy Bernstein here unveils nature in all its subatomic splendor. In this graceful account, Bernstein guides us through high-energy physics from the early twentieth century to the present, including such highlights as the newly discovered Higgs boson. Beginning with Ernest Rutherford’s 1911 explanation of the nucleus, a model of atomic structure emerged that sufficed until the 1930s, when new particles began to be theorized and experimentally confirmed. In the postwar period, the subatomic world exploded in a blaze of unexpected findings leading to the theory of the quark, in all its strange and charmed variations. An eyewitness to developments at Harvard University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Bernstein laces his story with piquant anecdotes of such luminaries as Wolfgang Pauli, Murray Gell-Mann, and Sheldon Glashow. Surveying the dizzying landscape of contemporary physics, Bernstein remains optimistic about our ability to comprehend the secrets of the cosmos—even as its mysteries deepen. We now know that over eighty percent of the universe consists of matter we have never identified or detected. A Palette of Particles draws readers into the excitement of a field where the more we discover, the less we seem to know.

This proceedings volume from a workshop by the same name sponsored by the Santa Fe Institute in August, 1989, covers a range of disciplines and subdisciplines of relevance to linguistics, phonetics, psycholinguistics, cognitive science, sociolinguistics, archaeological and anthropological linguistics, neuroanatomy, biology, and physics.