Book Description
From one of the architects of the new science of simplicity and complexity comes a highly personal, unifying vision of the natural world. As a theoretical physicist, Murray Gell-Mann has explored nature at its most fundamental level. His achievements include the 1969 Nobel Prize for work leading up to his discovery of the quark-the basic building block of all atomic nuclei throughout the universe. But Gell-Mann is a man of many intellectual passions, with lifelong interests in fields that seek to understand existence at its most complex: natural history, biological evolution, the history of language, and the study of creative thinking.These seemingly disparate pursuits come together in Gell-Mann's current work at The Santa Fe Institute, where scientists are investigating the similarities and differences among complex adaptive systemssystems that learn or evolve by utilizing acquired information. They include a child learning his or her native language, a strain of bacteria becoming resistant to an antibiotic, the scientific community testing new theories, an artist implementing a creative idea, a society developing new customs or superstitions, a computer learning to play chess, or the human race evolving ways of living in greater harmony with itself and with other inhabitants of the Earth.The Quark and the Jaguar is an engaging, elegantly written introduction to the life's work of one of this century's most accomplished and influential scientists. This is Gell-Mann's own story of finding the connections between the basic laws of physics and the complexity and diversity of the natural world. The simple: a quark inside an atom. The complex: a jaguar prowling its jungle territory in the night. Exploring the relationships between them becomes a series of exciting intellectual adventures. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (29)

The basics of information theory as relating to the science of emergent order is clearly presented
This book gives valuable information on how complex systems arise out of a simple, natural ground.Gell-Mann's theories are useful in understanding chaos theory as well as many branches of quantum physics.A description of Gell-Mann's ecological explorations and efforts to maintain the biosphere is also given.The magician and student of physics will be well rewarded for reading Gell-Mann's work.The processes of consciousness and so magical phenomena may be understood in this light.

Too tedious to finish
Mr. Gell-Mann won a Nobel Prize for his work in physics, but he will never will a Pulitzer for his writing.It's too tedious to endure.

I love reading books about physics.I tried to read this book -- twice.I wanted to like it.But both times, I got no more than a third of the way through, and couldn't force myself to read another word.

Mr. Gell-Mann's writing is too convoluted and dry, his theories so superficially presented.Unless you're a speed reader, I'd imagine there are very few people who would ever waste the time required to force themselves through this very disappointing book.

Complexity theme is contrived; superficial coverage of many subjects
Gell-Mann went to much effort to weave the diverse topics of this book together under the theme of complex adaptive systems. I found this to be a pointless endeavor. A good theme should provide cohesion or make the subject more approachable. Conceiving of both a single-celled organism and a culture as complex adaptive systems, however, provides little insight into the functioning of either and serves mostly to drive home the point that the notion of a complex adaptive system is so broad that nearly anything worth discussing falls under that heading.

Quantum physics is discussed at length. Unfortunately this section reads more like a catalog of concepts and discoveries than like a good introduction conveying key concepts. Other subjects (biology, evolution, ecosystems, computer learning, economics, public policy) are covered too superficially to yield anything of interest.

The major arguments of _The Quark and the Jaguar_ are as follows:

1) Effective complexity is not the same as algorithmic complexity. Algorithmic complexity is 0 for uniform data and highest for completely random data. (Potential) effective complexity is highest in the middle, where patterns and rules (schema) can be derived and minimal for both uniform data and random data.

2) Classical physics implies a deterministic world. How can anything interesting happen? Because quantum physics offers randomness.

3) Complex adaptive systems create schemas to model the data. This is true for the formation of life, to children learning to speak, to scientific progress, etc. Successful complex adaptive systems are solutions to problems. So the biological and cultural diversity on the planet represents a huge amount of valuable information.

4) We should preserve biological and cultural diversity so we don't lose valuable information.

What a disappointment
I might also have entitled my review, "See Carlos Camara's review of April 11, 2002."Camara captures my own thoughts to a tee.Where Gell-Mann is strongest, namely, on particle physics, his strengths shine through.Though hardly a rigorous survey of the field, the second section of Q&J is a compelling introduction to it -- and certainly whets one's appetite for further reading.The book's first section (an overview of the notion of complexity) is decent (though far better popular treatments can be found elsewhere).The book's third and fourth sections, however, are pretty much a total wash.I could tolerate them only insofar as they reflected the obvious integrity of the author.He is a political kindred spirit.That said, having purchased Q&J and had high expectations of it, I was surprised and not a little frustrated at how bereft of substance it was on matters "Jaguarian".More than a little disconnected, I found the second half of Q&J rambling, pedestrian, and even sophomoric.Certainly not what one expects of a Nobel prize winning physicist and of one of the founders of the Santa Fe institute.My respect for Gell-Mann, as a scientist and a humanist, is in no way diminished by Q&J, but I cannot help but feel that he (and his publisher) faltered with this effort.My advice: read the first half of Q&J for a cursory -- but well-written -- survey of complexity and particle physics.Skip the second half altogether.

trying very hard to make progress in "complexity" theory
The "reductionistic" scientific method, which seeks to reduce phonomena to simpler and more general underlying bludprints, has dominated the last three centuries.It works great in physics, as Newton domonstrated, but less well in other disciplines such as biology and psychology.For example, molecular biologists have isolated DNA, but have yet to adequately explain embroyonic development, protein folding and other riddles.To overcome these shortcomings, many are calling for a theory of complexity, which should focus on systems and the dynamics of development where order appears to organize itself from a bewildering number of interacting factors.

Gell-Mann argues that rather than replacing reductionist methods, complexity theory complements that approach.The quark is the simple and universal, the jaguar the complex.He suggests that between these two exists an unbroken chain.

Gell-Mann attempts to make his contribution with teh "complex adaptive system" that "acquires information about its environment" and indentifies "regularities in that information", which are then condensed into a "schema" or "model"; these latter are "non-static," and unlike a quark can evolve.Each complex adaptive system contains three strands: 1) basic rules; 2) frozen accidents; 3) a selection process.For example, language has genetically inherited cognitive capabilites with certain quirky attributes that persist and yet can change as the individual must describe new phenomena.A lot of the book is devoted to finding and explaining similar examples.It is a panoramic and entertaining excursion through human knowledge, if a bit cursory.

Gell-Mann also hopes to guide scientists into a more holistic and cross-disciplinary approaches.With its focus on historical development and links between the simple and complex, the study of complex adaptive systems, he argues, may be the spur required to stimulate such approaches, briging physics, chemistry, biology and even the social sciences.This is what he is doing at the Santa Fe Institute.

At its best, the book is a window into a great scientific mind, with fascinating mini-essays on state of the art science.Unfortunately, Gell-Mann is an uneven writer.Many passages are impenetrable to lay readers like myself.At a deeper level, he fails to critique the vague research agendas of the complexologists, who have been ridiculously popularised in such enues as Wired.Even the complex adaptive system may say too little about too much.Through it all, Gell-Mann maintains his pose as a total pedant.

REcommended.It is uneven, but this is one of the greatest thinks of the 20C.

... Read more

Book Description
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.

Read and cited by scientists worldwide, Advanced Book Classics are works that continue to inform today's groundbreaking research efforts. Redesigned and newly released in paperback, these graduate-level texts and monographs are now available to an even wider audience. Written by the most influential physicists of the twentieth century, these Advanced Book Classics promise to enrich and inspire a new generation of physicists. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Universe in 8ths
Particle Physics from one of only a handful whom understand them. Murray Gell-Mann does an excellent job of describing the very physics in which he pioneered; this is a most read for any physicist. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Murray Gell-Mann is a leading light in 20th-century physics, yet his name rings bells only for those interested in particle physics.Science writer George Johnson was fortunate enough to develop a friendly relationship with the great scientist, and his biography, Strange Beauty, glows with a rare intimacy gained from a notoriously private and irascible man. From his childhood in New York City to his current scientific elder-statesman status in New Mexico, Johnson explores Gell-Mann's life in glorious detail.A passionate, jealous, and brilliant man, he was capable of both profound insight and bitter lifelong rivalries, but Johnson finds there's much more to the man than these two simple poles; Gell-Mann's volatile family life and deft academic maneuvering also find room in this expansive biography.

The reader finds that Johnson's careful attention to detail shows more than it tells through enlightening stories of Gell-Mann's troubled, romantic, or pretentious dealings with peers, family, and even strangers.Explaining his strange surname means investigating old phone books, scientific legend, and family history, as the scientist is unwilling to shed light on the mystery (it turns out that his father hyphenated it, and Murray dreamed up etymologies as needed--giving rise to the tangled web of myths). Johnson is up to the challenge of recording the life story of a man nearly as strange as the quarks he discovered and named, and Strange Beauty lives up to the promise of its title.--Rob LightnerBook Description
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 Lower East Side, 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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (17)

Some strange guys live in Aspin
Murray Gell-Mann was a child prodigy from Manhattan who became one of the outstanding physicists of the 20th century -- the man who revealed the "Eightfold Way" of classifying subatomic particles, and coined the name "quark" for the most fundamental building block of matter.If you are looking for "crystallized mathematics" in this shell game of ever-evolving theories, this well-written book may leave you unenlightened -- the "standard model" of subatomic physics is never explained in much detail.However, if you are interested in psychology,you will be fascinated by Johnson's portrayal ofa compulsive and sometimes tortured personality who never seemed able to live up to his own expectations.And how original were his achievements?The pattern of the Eightfold Way was first discovered by an Ne'enam -- an Israeli colonel who developed the theory in his spare time when he wasn't buying submarines for the Israeli army.The ideas behind quarks may have been inadvertently lifted from Zweig.Was there possibly a ironic undertone to Feynmans famous quote? -- "Our knowledge of fundumental physicis contains not one fruitful idea that does not carry the name of Murray Gell-Mann."He was not above buying stolen goods -- Gell-Mann missed the funeral services for his arch rival Caltech colleague Richard Feynman when he was arrested in an FBI sting operation trying to purchase smuggled Peruvian artifacts.The multilingual Gell-Mann was able to deliver his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in perfect Swedish, but he was so paralyzed by writer's block that he stands alone as the only Nobel Prize winner who refused to submit an official lecture, and his solitary book "The Quark and the Jaguar" was renamed "The Jerk and the Quagmire" by frustrated publishers who could never get Gell-Mann to meet a deadline.Ultimately, Gell-Mann's difficult personality alienated him from his colleagues and even his biographers. Was this genius too disciplined -- or not disciplined enough?By the end of the book I found myself wondering if the key to Gell-Mann's legendary self-frustration was that something was lost in the search-light glare of his brilliant mind-- a muse.

--Auralgo

Dear George Johnson, esq.
I have this book of March 4, 2003.

I ask you about its edition in Russia?

vavivlad-rvc@mtu-net.ru

This is strange beauty for a popular science
The author intrigues and grasps the reader by the stories about physics of 21 century. It is physics of a particle and only particles. The author makes it do benevolently to allow human reason to penetrate in salt of a science and to open for itself new.

Further it can directly flash in a good pleasant society, with the friends or before the heads on a service. So!

It is not population of a science. It is introduction far in a cult of individuality, doing elementary particles huge as our life and a science.

The author comes off in this book as the devoted theorist and passionate man, but also and as the real man.

The search of this "new" particles it are always jumps on a hippodrome. In synhro-, fazo- and so on -tron, the same circle for run and same human passions.

The reader can want to ignore some material of the author and to not read all¸ in succession.

However, to tell the truth, it is an excellent and well readable material for any educated man and woman, especially, if they are Americans, moreover and lives in USA.

Powerful biography of a powerful physicist
This is an easy 5.George Johnson took care of the writing and left the physics to Murray.I have always felt an uneasy awe when hearing of the "next" Gell-Mann concept as I grew up hoping to someday become a scientist.

Johnson's book exposes the raw energy of scientific creation in a man so obsessed with "doing it all".It reveals personal traits of a driven human spirit.Based on the prose, Murray must have been something to deal with; but of course, wasn't it well worth it.I know I haven't; but I feel I have met the physicist that orchestrated the rag-tag "particle zoo" of Opie to perform its siren songs.

From the birds that he knew, and thru languages he expressed himself of which math was only one, Gell-Mann would have fit well in the Renaissance.Johnson also exposes Murray's personal life, its beauty, its tragedy, its strangeness.

Though a biography, Johnson's book is also an excellant account of the competition to paint a picture of the physical world.There is little physics, but the events and descriptions of the breakthrus are a must read for any serious physicist.

I hope to hear more from Johnson and more from Murray Gell-Mann.

Success and Frailties of a Nobel-Prize Physicist
George Johnson beautifully describes the life and work of the Nobel-Prizephysicist Murray Gell-Mann and the revolutionary history of elementaryparticle physics. In addition to how the important discoveries of theEightfold Way and quarks were made, we learn Gell-Mann's diverse interestsin linguistics, ornithology, archaeology, environmental problems andcomplex phenomena. The author writes not only about the physicist'sbrilliance and success but also his human frailties such as his experiencesof writer's block and procrastination and his brooding temper, thus makingthe biography complete as viewed from every side. This is a good book forlaypersons as well as for physicists. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Murray Gell-Mann, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 1789 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Customer Reviews (1)

Multidisciplinary perspective on human language
First, this is a technical, academic book, targeting linguists, psychologists, cognitive scientists.Not introductory.

Having said that, I enjoyed the book tremendously.My background is in linguistics andcomputational linguistics.The various authors consider a) the ways inwhich language is a complex adaptive system (and what it means to becomplex and adaptive) and b) the evidence we have about how languageevolved, from various perspectives.For example, how human languagediffers from, but is related to, abilities and attributes of higherprimates, and how the two might have been bridged. Evidence is drawn frommedicine/brain science, as well as physical artifacts studied byarcheologists.Other papers look at linguistic data from the perspectiveof various theoretical orientations, including the typological perspective,considering the types of variation that is and is NOT found in humanlanguage and what that may suggests about the language faculty.Languagedevelopment stages in children, and the amazing area of creoles, in whichchildren construct a complete language from fragmentary pieces are also ofinterest.

Anyone who has a good technical background in linguisticswill find it accessible, and it is an engaging way to broaden your thinkingabout language and linguistic analysis. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Antioch Review, published by Antioch Review, Inc. on March 22, 2000. The length of the article is 355 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics.(Review)(Brief Article)
Author: Albert B. Stewart
Publication: The Antioch Review (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 2000
Publisher: Antioch Review, Inc.
Volume: 58Issue: 2Page: 245

Article Type: Book Review, Brief Article

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more