Murray Gell-Mann

In 1955, Gell-Mann married British archeologist J. Margaret Dow. The couple had two children, a daughter, Elizabeth Sarah Gell-Mann and a son, Nicholas Webster Gell-Mann. Margaret died in 1981.

In 1992, Gell-Mann married Marcia Southwick. He has a stepson named Nicholas Southwick Levis from this union. He now lives in Santa Fe.

Murray Gell-Mann was born on September 15, 1929 in New York City into a family of Jewish immigrants. They had their original home in Czernowitz, an ancient city inthe Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is now known as Chernivtsi and is part of Ukraine.

His father, Arthur Isidore Gell-Mann taught English as Second Language. His mother’s name was Pauline (née Reichstein) Gell-Mann. Although they had to struggle hard during the Great Depression, Arthur made sure that his son had proper education.

Murray had his schooling at Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School. As a child, he was greatly interested in mathematics. Over the time, he began to grow a wide range of interest. However, he did not like physics at school and this was only subject, in which he always received poor grades.

Nonetheless, Murray graduated from CGPS as class valedictorian at the age of 15 and won a scholarship to Yale University. Although at that time, his interest lay in archeology and linguistics his father urged him to take up science.

Ultimately, he enrolled at Jonathon Edwards College at Yale and whimsically chose physics as his major. He was very soon captivated by the subject. In 1947, he took part in William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition and came out second.

In 1952, he joined Institute for Nuclear Studies, University of Chicago as an instructor in physics. He was promoted to the post of Assistant Professor in 1953 and an Associate Professor in 1954.

During this period, Gell-Mann mainly worked on the cosmic ray particles like kaons and hyperons. These particles, which had recently been discovered, behaved rather strangely. For example, many of these new particles decayed more slowly and the physicists could not explain the reason.

To explain such phenomenon, Gell-Mann introduced his concept of ‘strangeness’. It is a quantum property, which accounted for the decay pattern of certain mesons. Incidentally, Japanese physicist Kazuhiko Nishijima also worked independently on the same problem and came to the same conclusion almost at the same time.

In 1955, Gell-Mann joined California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) in Pasadena as a member of faculty and was promoted to the post of a full professor within a short period. At the age of thirty he was the youngest person to hold such post in the history of the Institute.

In and around that time, around one hundred new particles had been discovered in the nuclei of an atom. The characteristics and behaviors puzzled the physicists to such an extent that some began to refer to them as ‘particle zoo’.

The concept of ‘strangeness’ is one of Gell-Mann’s most important contributions to science. He suggested that when a sub-atomic particle interacts by means of a strong electromagnetic force the strangeness is conserved. He suggested that these particles be given strangeness numbers so that they could be evaluated properly.

The ‘Eightfold Way’ is another of Gell-Man’s important contributions to science. Through this concept Gell-Mann organized the newly discovered subatomic baryons and mesons into octets and paved the way for further study.