Strange beauty:
Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth Century Physics
By George Johnson
Knopf, 434 pages, $30
On the eve of the official publication of “Strange Beauty,” George Johnson’s biography of Murray Gell-Mann, the 1999 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Dutch physicists Martinus J.G. Veltman and Gerardus ‘t Hooft for their work on quantum field theory in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was 30 years ago that Gell-Mann was awarded his 1969 Nobel Prize in physics. There is a poetic justice in these coincidences. Veltman and ‘t Hooft’s work bears crucially on the story told by this book, that of Gell-Mann’s scientific life and the always precarious balance of boldness and caution involved in making a scientific discovery.
Veltman and ‘t Hooft’s work was indispensable in establishing the strong-interaction (or nuclear force) part of the so-called Standard Model, the reigning view of the subatomic world based jointly on quantum field theory and the idea of quarks. Gell-Mann’s work on quantum field theory and the co-invention (with George Zweig) of quarks resulting from it are among Gell-Mann’s major contributions to the revolution in 20th Century physics invoked in Johnson’s subtitle. The number of these contributions is remarkable, as Johnson is right to emphasize. Gell-Mann rivals the best physicists in the second half of this century and holds his own even against the giants of the golden age of quantum physics earlier in this century. He won his 1969 Nobel Prize for his contributions during the preceding 15 or so extraordinary years. Quarks, the subatomic particles for which Gell-Mann is now most famous for introducing, were not mentioned among them, not yet being recognized as quite (if at all) legitimate.
Few physicists now doubt the reality of quarks or (some prefer to put it more guardedly) the existence of something in the ultimate constituents of nature, as we understand them now, that compels us to speak about quarks and gluons (which bind quarks together within nuclei and confine them there). In short, quarks are as real or as unreal as anything else in the quantum world. That recognition took a while, beginning with Gell-Mann’s own deep doubts, and Veltman and ‘t Hooft’s work played a decisive role in it. They established a beachhead from which an adequate theory of quarks could be built and some of their features properly explained. (The theory predicts six quarks, the “strange” and “beauty” of Johnson’s title among them.)
The balance needed between boldness and caution in science has a strange beauty of its own. To find it is often as daunting a task as that of a scientific discovery itself. Ultimately, Gell-Mann was always lucky enough, or perhaps he was too good a physicist to miss his chances to make his key discoveries.
Of course, a story such as this is a complex mixture of physics (experiment and theory), individual and collective psychology, and social and cultural forces in play. Johnson depicts, often well, a good part of this mixture and gives us a sense of its significance. His presentation of physics is among the better popular expositions, although some explanations of key concepts are not altogether satisfying. The problem is that there is not enough physics in the book or explication of its workings. As a result, it does not always do justice to the role of physics in Gell-Mann’s life, in particular in the story of Gell-Mann and quarks. The book focuses more on Gell-Mann’s personal psychology and anxieties than on his sense of physics, which often takes a back seat.
Gell-Mann was incomparable in his ability to link theory and experiment, in part by reducing the theoretical mess to an essential order. He was also keenly sensitive to how various sides of a theory (or different theories) fit, or did not fit together, and if they did not, even his greatest ideas could become suspect to him. Johnson notes this especially in the context of Gell-Mann’s hesitation to publish some of his key work. But he reads this hesitation and Gell-Mann’s general uneasiness concerning some of his discoveries primarily in personal psychological (anxiety) and social terms, rather than in terms of Gell-Mann’s view of physics and of the status of his and other theories (or experiments) at the time. While Gell-Mann may have been ambivalent and “timid,” or rather cautious, he also had good reasons to be–for example, when he introduced quarks.
Nor does Johnson present a real picture of the power, richness and complexity of Gell-Mann’s intellect or sufficient insights into its workings. Oddly (although not surprisingly, given Johnson’s take on Gell-Mann and his quasi-Freudian concept of biography), we get a rather better sense of the mind of Gell-Mann’s father, Arthur. We almost get a more-involved account of the father’s favorite hobby, manipulating and playing with numbers, than of the son’s virtuoso work in the stratosphere of modern mathematics and physics, an account that could better convey a sense of the strange beauty of his work. It is, admittedly, difficult to represent or explain such technical work and fully convey its strangeness and beauty to a lay reader. But Gell-Mann is a physicist, and this is what ultimately makes him worthy of a major biography.
The main strength of Johnson’s account is in its depiction of the social milieu of modern physics and the psychology of the interactions within it. This is, I think, where he will find most of his readers and where his readers will appreciate him most. Unfortunately, near the end of the book Johnson gets rather too absorbed in a description of the world of wealth and celebrity, which, thanks to his enormous prestige as a physicist, Gell-Mann is now able, and seems overeager, to join. Regardless of how accurate this part of Johnson’s story may be, Gell-Mann is much more interesting as a world-class physicist than as an Aspen-class social celebrity–at least to this reader.
It is not that this aspect of Gell-Mann’s life should not be addressed. It is rather a question of balance. Gell-Mann has continued to do important work in physics, which hardly receives adequate treatment. Johnson is better on Gell-Mann’s work on complexity theory, although this account remains too curtailed as well. He also succeeds better in describing Gell-Mann’s efforts in establishing the Santa Fe Institute for research into broad scientific subjects, in particular the concept of complexity, and his related work, and in describing the life of the physics community earlier in the book. Perhaps not altogether deliberately, Johnson, especially in describing Gell-Mann’s work on “The Quark and the Jaguar,” his popular book on modern physics, gives a good insight into the packaging of quarks, physics and physicists themselves by popular and commercial culture. This packaging process appears to be largely responsible for the uneven quality of Gell-Mann’s book.
Johnson’s determination to avoid a hagiography and idealization of Gell-Mann and other physicists is commendable. (If anything, he seems to prefer to err on the negative side.) And yet, in the end, his portrayal of Gell-Mann remains flat. This, again, especially concerns Gell-Mann’s mind as a physicist. But, by and large, the same may be said about his portrait of Gell-Mann as a human being. The novelistic skills that are required for such a portrayal are seen mostly in the character of Gell-Mann’s father.
Johnson’s picture of Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and colleague of Gell-Mann’s at the California Institute of Technology, is at the opposite pole, almost sliding into a caricature. Next to Gell-Mann’s father, Feynman may be the most important ghostly shadow over Gell-Mann’s life (in this case as a physicist). At best, a clumsy and unfortunate caption next to a photo of both of them–“Who was smarter, Murray Gell-Mann or Richard Feynman?”–trivializes the situation rather than helps to understand it. Feynman may have liked to play a clown once in a while, sometimes even in his writings. But, leaving biographers’ accounts of Feynman aside (there have been several major biographies in recent years, and three are cited in Johnson’s bibliography), Feynman’s portrait does not ring true in this book. In any event, it will not to most of those who have read the well-documented exchanges between Feynman and others, or Feynman’s own books, including his popular books, on physics. They display a rare depth of understanding and a cultivated intellect. In the end, there are all too many minor and superficial portraits in Johnson’s book. More physics and philosophical thought of Gell-Mann and others could have taken this space.
There are other, smaller, problems. It may be true that the late Nobel laureate in physics Abdus Salam was Indian-born, as Johnson says, but he was Pakistani, as Johnson ought to have known from several books that he claims as his sources. In describing Vienna, Johnson invokes, “the old baroque splendor of the (Austrian) empire, with its Strauss waltzes and rococo style.” Vienna has both, but baroque and rococo styles are not the same. In describing symmetry, there seems to be some confusion between group theory and Lie group theory; not all groups used in quantum physics, let alone in general, are Lie groups. But again, these are small things, and they should not subtract from the credit that is due to Johnson’s book at its best.
One large question may remain, a general question rather than one posed to Johnson’s book: Did Gell-Mann possess the kind of ultimate vision of physical nature that appears to define his greatest predecessors and contemporaries, whom he rivals in his mastery of the craft and the subtlety of his understanding of physics? Perhaps only Gell-Mann’s physics can give us an answer, although a differently aimed biography, or an autobiography, could come close. For that, one would have to wait.
But one could set out on a journey of reading and reach other lands of modern physics. Johnson’s book has places well worth visiting and plenty of road signs to other exciting sites. It is a good place to start.
