Biographies serve a great historical function by preserving the facts of the lives of our greatest thinkers, doers, politicians, etc. They're like paper time capsules for future generations. They're like exploded microcosms of the great annals of history. In a sense, they're mini-histories.
Despite this, the best ones can also be highly relevant to the contemporaneous culture surrounding them and damn fun to read. On the surface, physics might not be the most sensuously compelling subject for a book—its practitioners are probably thought of in quite a similar vein. Happily, this is not the case. The best of the best (the geniuses, if you will) are full of peculiar brands of neuroses that can provide hours of enjoyment for the outsider. And Murray Gell-Mann is undeniably one of the best of the best of the best. If the name Gell-Mann doesn't ring a bell, it might help to note that he was the chap that essentially discovered and named the quark. He grew up in a poor Jewish family that lived a highly nomadic existence in Manhattan, graduated Yale at 18, earned a doctorate from MIT at 21, and went on to take the world of particle physics by storm.
Besides being able to come up with the catchy—yet still highly meaningful—names for new theories and particles like the quark (he also coined the quantum number "strangeness" and the "Eight-Fold Way"), Gell-Mann had an unmatched scope in vision—an ability to see the entire field with all of its disparities and smooth them out with one simple theoretical tweak. And a knack, due in part to his photographic memory and "the breadth of his learning [which] had become legendary," for remembering every relevant detail from every relevant paper he had ever read. He could solve the Gordian knots of calculus in his head—and order Chinese take-out in Mandarin.
But life wasn't all roses and Nobel prizes for the poor Jewish boy-cum-superstar. Despite all his brilliance, in the cutthroat world of academic writing and publishing, Gell-Mann had a pathological fear of being wrong that is, to some extent, traced back to some Freudian ties with his father's intolerance for error. As a result he had a hard time maintaining friendships, which frequently strained or snapped. "Over the years colleagues had been left dumbfounded by how self-centered the man could be." Hardly a fair representation, because "for every physicist he had cut down, there was another whose career he had promoted."
George Johnson presents us with a portrait of one of the most complex minds in the history of particle physics; a serious man intent on furthering the knowledge and scope of the discipline. And not merely for the sake of more physics, for Gell-Mann also contributed vast amounts of time and energy in ecological and environmental fields, trying to make sense of the strange beauty of the planet we inhabit—the complexity that has somehow arisen from the simplicity of physical particles.
"Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics"
By George Johnson
Knopf, $30, 432 pages
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.