Strange Beauty [Paperback]

As its subtitle Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics indicates, this is a biography of the quirky human being and father of quarks, the brilliant American Nobel Prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann. Born in New York in 1929, he is a surviving member of a great generation of physicists who rode the wave of the atomic bomb and its aftermath in theoretical physics. Gell-Mann rubbed shoulders and argued the toss with the likes of Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Richard Feynman.

George Johnson, an award-winning science writer for the New York Times and author of four other books, spent several years compiling this wonderful portrait of Gell-Mann, warts and all. Johnson certainly conveys for the general reader the brilliant, complicated, always fascinating and often exasperating man that he eventually came to like and respect.

Gell-Mann was something of a prodigy, graduating from Yale at 18 and getting his doctorate from MIT by the age of 21. Within a few years he was recognised as one of the foremost theorists in the strange world of particle physics, who studied the behaviour of subatomic particles and proposed the existence of quarks, one of the fundamental constituents of matter. For this work he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1969.

As Johnson describes and explains, life within the highly competitive academic world of particle physics was particularly rebarbative but Gell-Mann managed to shoulder his way through to the top. A Dickensian character, he was at times a show-off and bully but also a generous polymath, who subsequently has espoused environmentalism and arms control.

Under Johnson's expert guidance (assisted by a glossary, notes and bibliography) even the general reader is guided through the complex science and life of this charming conversationalist... apologetic procrastinator and... dispenser of acid remarks--Murray Gell-Mann. --Douglas Palmer --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Murray Gell-Mann is a leading light in 20th- century physics, yet his name rings few bells outside of 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 much more to the man than these two simple poles; Gell-Mann's volatile family life and deft academic manoeuvring 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 Beautylives up to the promise of its title. --Rob Lightner, Amazon.com --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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.