Product Description
From one of the architects of the new science of simplicity and complexity comes 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. Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann offers a uniquely personal and unifying vision of the relationship between the fundamental laws of physics and the complexity and diversity of the natural world.
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Customer Reviews (33)

Gell-Mann and Philosophy
The thoughts of Gell-Mann are manna for the serious scientist in search of a good read on the philosophy behind his view of science.

Excellent Exposition on Sub-atomic Physics
Not too many scientists write about their subject well, and Murray Gell-Mann is a notable suggestion.Gell-Mann is most notable in the scientific community for his discovery, theoretically, of quarks as being the underlying constituents of protons, neutrons and related particles.Basically, by the early 19060's, a veritable zoo of sub-atomic particles had been found in atom smashers and other instruments, with no apparent rhyme or reason why nature should present us with such a bounty.Gell-Mann, using nothing more than mathematical arguments (group theory) was able to predict the existence of simpler particles, called quarks, various versions of them combining to form the proton and neutronand other "strange" particles that were showing up in experiments.

Gell-Mann theory of quarks was later expanded into strange quarks, a family which paralleled other unexplained particles, such as muons, taus, and various versions of neutrinos.Basically, what Gell-Mann showed was that there were three parallel types of matter particles:the three families of quarks (up/down, charm/strange, and top/bottom, three families of electrons (electrons, muons, and taus) an neutrinos (electron-neutrino, muon-neutrino, and tau-neutrino).There was also a parallel series of force particles which described the interactions of these three.Several years later, when these particles showed up in atom smashers, with the properties Gell-Mann predicted for them, his fame was assured.

All in all, a fascinating description of how modern particle theory was developed, using largely mathematical arguments, and Gell-Mann's narrative is gripping as he unfolds the story.

The scientist's bible on the nature of nature
Gell-Mann is the quintessential polymath of out time.And "The Quark and The Jaguar" is a grand tour de force in the nature of nature.If you don't understand any part of it the first time through, it is worth reading over and over again until you do (especially Part II: The Quantum Universe).The lights will come on in your mind sometimes one twinkle at a time, sometimes in chain reactions, and sometimes in fleeting, brilliant bursts of insight that are lost a moment later and regained only after several more read-throughs.The book is so dense, in one section, it dispatches (without naming names) pretty much all of Gary Zukov's 1979 popularization of pseudo-scientific mysticism "The Dancing WuLi Masters" as well as the faux paradox of Schrodinger's Cat in a space of about two pages.Despite this density, it nevertheless remains accessible, understandable, and startlingly free of mathematics.Many who seek truth in religion make a practice of reading the Bible over and over again, memorizing chapter and verse.If you seek truth through scientific inquiry, this book could well be your bible.

First, meet the jaguar then find the quark. They do not interact...
The book contains four sections dedicated to Mr. Gell-Mann's scientific passions: from his adventures in particle physics at Caltech (the simple) and nonlinear dynamics and chaos at the Sta. Fe Institute (the complex) to his quest for scientific truth and his environmental protection activities. All four sections are completely independent and almost not linked to one another. I wished that more parallels had been driven between the simple and the complex.

In the "meaty" sections Mr. Gell-Mann gives a very broad overview of the areas involved, without entering into many details. The book contains virtually no formulas and everything is narrated in a very easy way, so it's best as an introduction to the topics or as a summary of what you have read elsewhere. Regarding complex systems, I found his explanations of algorithmic complexity, effective complexity and other information theory concepts quite well explained but the section does not form a coherent whole. A better and far more comprehensive explanation of complex systems and Sta. Fe Institute "adventures" can be found in Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics. Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life or Chaos: Making a New Science are other excellent alternatives. If you like it really really "complex" you can try Investigations. As for particle physics, you can find deeper explanations of the standard model and of the four forces and their unification at high energies in Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics (Princeton Science Library) and Deep Down Things: The Breathtaking Beauty of Particle Physics.

I found his explanation of the uncertainty principle that rules the subatomic universe, as well as the effect of the multiple stories and how they cancel out because of quantum decoherence very illustrative. He explained them in a comprehensible way (ok, not really, but I think this is almost as good as it gets) and for the first time since I am reading this kind of "crazy stuff", I had the welcome impression that I was reading a sensible and down-to-earth person. I can live with the measurement uncertainty in the sense that one cannot determine the position and the angular moment of a particle at the same time, as well as with quantum uncertainty in the sense of multiple stories. I have no problem as long as the particles remain in a "probabilistic space" and the stories add up, cancel out or whatever it is that decoherence (or any other mechanism) does to allow for classical physics: in short, as long as I can grasp an apple and eat it, particles may do whatever they wish. However, saying that a cat is alive and dead at the same time or alternating between both states really goes beyond me. Mr. Gell-Mann explains how this multi-cited example together with other widespread and probably misunderstood quantum assumptions are not implied by quantum mechanics, ripping off the fancy and mystic parts of these topics. No living-dead cat? What a relief!

The last two sections are completely out of place in this book: the third seems to include whatever crossed the author's mind and the fourth is an attempt to promote conservation practices of both biodiversity and cultural diversity. However, each essay is a masterpiece of well balanced and beautifully rational thoughts and explanations. I thought skeptics' organizations were aimed at disproving everything that seemed unscientific and I was positively surprised to read that a magician is part of the team and that the author (a regular collaborator) found more pleasure in the rare occasions when it was not a fraud and instead of "disproving" they "proved" some phenomena. True scientific spirit after all! Finally, Mr. Gell-Mann's aim at the conservation of diversity is only fair and he succeeds to transmit us the urgency with which we need to act without sounding like an apocalyptic prophet.

The Quark and the Jaguar
We ordinary mortals can't really understand quantum mechanics, but this book gives us a bit more insight! ... Read more

Product Description
Murray Gell-Mann is one of the leading physicists of the world. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969 for his work on the classification and symmetries of elementary particles, including the approximate SU(3) symmetry of hadrons. His list of publications is impressive; a number of his papers have become landmarks in physics. In 1953, Gell-Mann introduced the strangeness quantum number, conserved by the strong and electromagnetic interactions but not by the weak interaction. In 1954 he and F E Low proposed what was later called the renormalization group. In 1958 he and R P Feynman wrote an important article on the V-A theory of the weak interaction. In 1961 and 1962 he described his ideas about the SU(3) symmetry of hadrons and its violation, leading to the prediction of the - particle. In 1964 he proposed the quark picture of hadrons. In 1971 he and H Fritzsch proposed the exactly conserved color quantum number and in 1972 they discussed what they later called quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the gauge theory of color. These major publications and many others are collected in this volume, providing physicists with easy access to much of Gell-Mann's work. Some of the articles are concerned with his recollections of the history of elementary particle physics in the third quarter of the twentieth century. ... Read more

Product Description
"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.



Amazon.com Review
Murray Gell-Mann is a leading light in 20th-century physics,yet his name rings bells only for those interested in particlephysics.Science writer George Johnson was fortunate enough todevelop a friendly relationship with the great scientist, and hisbiography, Strange Beauty, glows with a rare intimacy gainedfrom a notoriously private and irascible man. From his childhood inNew York City to his current scientific elder-statesman status in NewMexico, Johnson explores Gell-Mann's life in glorious detail.Apassionate, jealous, and brilliant man, he was capable of bothprofound insight and bitter lifelong rivalries, but Johnson findsthere's much more to the man than these two simple poles; Gell-Mann'svolatile family life and deft academic maneuvering also find room inthis expansive biography.

The reader finds that Johnson's carefulattention to detail shows more than it tells through enlighteningstories of Gell-Mann's troubled, romantic, or pretentious dealingswith peers, family, and even strangers.Explaining his strangesurname means investigating old phone books, scientific legend, andfamily history, as the scientist is unwilling to shed light on themystery (it turns out that his father hyphenated it, and Murraydreamed up etymologies as needed--giving rise to the tangled web ofmyths). Johnson is up to the challenge of recording the life story ofa man nearly as strange as the quarks he discovered and named, andStrange Beauty lives up to the promise of its title.--RobLightner ... Read more

Customer Reviews (19)

Great Bio of a Physics Superstar
Personally, I purchased this bio of Gell-Mann out of curiosity. It is always a pleasure for me to read about the interesting characters that produced our modern understanding of the universe, from large-scale to small, and I've always read interesting tidbits about Gell-Mann and stories of his (in)famous personality... but never an in-depth biography that would give a fuller picture of the man and the entire spectrum of his scientific work and outside interests. Well, look no further, this excellent bio filled the bill.

To say that author George Johnson (an accomplished science writer) did a great job capturing Gell-Mann's personality and scientific world would be an understatement. The book is as thorough a treatment that could be desired on a popular level, successfully capturing this multi-faceted man and his complex world of fundamental physics, as well as his interaction with other complex characters who choose particle physics for a career :-).

Gell-Mann wasn't just a particle physicist; his interests were actually very broad and included a fascination with the diversity of biological eco-systems on up to exploring possible rigorous methodologies for the social sciences (especially psychology). Of course, his interest in complex systems plays a big part in all of these areas. Not to mention, Gell-Mann was fascinated by various languages and cultures around the world (the more obscure, the better), in part because of his life-long fascination with diversity.So we see a man with boundless curiosity. Given his enormous intellect, one might expect these varied interests would be the case anyway, but sometimes scientists get locked into a particular mentality and can't seem to get out of a box. Gell-Mann definitely got out of the box.

I learned many new insights about Gell-Mann here. For one thing, Gell-Mann seemed to struggle with the ontological status of his "quark" model, not quite getting to the point of believing quarks were any more than a mathematical construction. While many other physicists took his quark model at face value, as apparently actually being physical sub-components of particles (which was later shown experimentally), Gell-Mann seemed to hesitate on this score. Revealed here, perhaps, was a continuing fear of being "wrong" on a particular topic, which to Gell-Mann's rather anal personality was a horror in itself :-).
When it was shown that quarks were actually concrete but "confined", Gell-Mann quickly changed his tune on their "imaginary" status, saying all along he had meant "confined". An amusing insight into his need to always be right, I guess...:-)

Also interesting was reading about his disagreements with theoretical biologist/fellow Santa-Fe member Stuart Kauffman. While Gell-Mann seemed to clearly realize the limits of a strictly reductionist approach to phenomena, he nevertheless disapproved of Kauffman and others always looking for "something new" as necessary for studying emergent properties of a system.Gell-Mann's own background as a particle physicist seemed to be a firm base from which to view complexity, without necessarily trying to evoke "new laws".

Gell-Mann's famous ego-battles with Richard Feynman are recounted fully here too. Here we have perhaps the two greatest physicists of their generation, and perhaps the two largest egos :-).Another reviewer commented how author George Johnson seems to paint an unflattering portrait of Feynman, which I didn't personally see. Johnson sees in Feynman a carefully-orchestrated persona to the public as a wild and crazy guy...which seems to be how Gell-Mann saw Feynman too. There is little argument Feynman knew how to play up to the media; he strikes me as a character that knew full well how to milk his public image to get press coverage. Gell-Mann was not nearly the extroverted showman that Feynman was, so naturally we see some resentment here. At any rate, in the book you can read all about the competition between these two intellectual giants, with egos to match.

Back to our book. Highly recommended science writing...five stars. I believe laypeople everywhere should be interested in how science developed in the 20th century onward as part of one's intellectual education. It's hard to call oneself "educated" if one remains ignorant of many of the basic achievements of modern science, but that's just me.
Bios of great scientists like Gell-Mann are therefore always welcome.

Quirks and all (I'll resist a play on "quirk", although Gell-Mann would no doubt look up the etymology and set me straight), these men's work produced something of enormous benefit to mankind.

Wonderful
Keeping us focused on what it takes to make great physics, and a great physicist, is more important today than ever.Physics needs money, mostly from us as taxpayers, and Johnson shows what we get for this.Strange Beauty reminds us too that leadership in science does not come at the wave of a wand. It requires infrastructure and endless patience.

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. ... Read more

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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

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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

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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

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A great variety of complex phenomena in many scientific fields exhibit power-law behavior, reflecting a hierarchical or fractal structure. Many of these phenomena seem to be susceptible to description using approaches drawn from thermodynamics or statistical mechanics, particularly approaches involving the maximization of entropy and of Boltzmann-Gibbs statistical mechanics and standard laws in a natural way.The book addresses the interdisciplinary applications of these ideas, and also on various phenomena that could possibly be quantitatively describable in terms of these ideas. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Much ado ...
.. about a student-t like distribution. Too much ado. There is no generalization of entropy (see the comment by Nauenberg and Balian in 2005 Europhysics News, e.g.) and no 'generalized thermostatistics. In fact, there is nothing but a postulated distribution that (as do student-ts typically) has a Gaussian limit. So what?

The claim of 'nonlinear Fokker-Planck" and "nonlinear Markov processes" was quite easy to explode: There is no such thing as a 'nonlinear Markov process'. There is no such thing as a 'nonlinear Fokker-Planck equation' for a conditional probability. A conditional probability with initial state memory is nonMarkovian. A conditional probability with initial state memory is not guaranteed to obey a Chapman-Kolmogorov equation and usually doesn't. A Chapman-Kolmogorov equation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a Markov process. A Fokker-Planck equation with memory of an initial state in its drift and/or diffusion coefficients does not generate a Markov process. A nonlinear diffusion equation does not define any stochastic process at all, in fact a diffusion equation for a 1-point density defines no stochastic process at all. A 1-point density cannot be used to identify/define a stochastic process, both scaling Markov processes and strongly nonMarkov processes like fractional Brownian motion have exactly the same 1-point density, with widely differing conditional densities. For detailed explanations see cond-mat/0701589 and references therein.

It would be of interest to psychologists and sociologists to study and analyze how such 'movements', based on claims hanging in thin air, gain a multitude of followers and hangers-on, as this movement has. The literature over the last 10 years is riddled with wrong and empty papers on such stuff. ... Read more

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Professor Murray Gell-Mann is one of the most influential and brilliant scientists of the twentieth century. His work on symmetries, including the invention of the 'quark', in the 1950s and early 1960s has provided a foundation for much of modern particle physics and was recognised by the award of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969. This book is a collection of research articles especially written by eminent scientists to celebrate Gell-Mann's 60th birthday, in September 1989. The main body of contributions are concerned with theoretical particle physics and its applications to cosmology. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from World of Earth Science, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 486 words.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.A comprehensive guide to the concepts, theories, discoveries, pioneers, and issues relating to topics in earth science. Its encyclopedic approach offers entries that are written in easy to understand language. ... Read more

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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

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Murray Gell-Mann is an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He formulated the quark model of hadronic resonances, and identified the SU flavor symmetry of the light quarks, extending isospin to include strangeness, which he also discovered. He discovered the V-A theory of chiral neutrinos in collaboration with Richard Feynman. He created current algebra in the 1960s as a way of extracting predictions from quark models when the fundamental theory was still murky, which led to model-independent sum rules confirmed by experiment. Gell-Mann, along with Maurice Levy, discovered the sigma model of pions, which describes low energy pion interactions. Modifying the integer-charged quark model of Han and Nambu, Fritzsch and Gell-Mann were the first to write down the modern accepted theory of quantum chromodynamics although they did not anticipate asymptotic freedom. Gell-Mann is responsible for the see-saw theory of neutrino masses, that produces masses at the inverse-GUT scale in any theory with a right-handed neutrino, like the SO model. ... Read more