Murray Gell-Mann
No Ordinary Genius
Norah Levine
At age 15, Murray Gell-Mann was freshman at Yale; by 22, he had a Ph.D. in physics from MIT. And at 35, when he proposed the existence of quarks in 1964, he not only revolutionized our understanding of the atom but also captured the popular imagination with clever names for its most basic particles. That work, later proved correct, earned him a 1969 Nobel Prize. These days, Gell-Mann is a fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, which he helped found 25 years ago. Now, as he approaches his 80th birthday, his famously broad-ranging intellect is as sharp as ever. Here he weighs in on his life’s work.
What brought you to Santa Fe?
In 1956, I became a consultant to Los Alamos, so I came here with my wife that summer. We fell in love with the place. I couldn’t move here completely until I retired from my professorship at Caltech, in 1992.
Why did you found the institute here?
A number of us who had senior status at the lab had luncheon meetings once in a while, and the only thing we ever discussed was founding an institute in Santa Fe—not run for the government, not dealing with weapons, but just for scientific research. It would be a theoretical institute. We wouldn’t try to have large, expensive pieces of equipment.
You wanted to bring together scientists with varied interests.
I urged that we make it transdisciplinary. People with backgrounds in physics, biology, social sciences, and so on would form self-organized groups to do research making use of their various talents. This meant breaking with a lot of academic tradition—departments, curricula, textbooks, and professional societies and journals. When we started, people continued to look askance at what we were doing. But not anymore.
There’s been huge growth in interdisciplinary studies in recent years.
Now it’s overvalued, I would say! Delegations of people from all over the world want to set up a Santa Fe Institute in their countries. I tell people there’s a long line of penguins who want to set one up in Antarctica.
What were you hoping to study at SFI?
I urged that we look for some sort of a grand synthesis. And at the two founding workshops, the speeches were almost all about simplicity and complexity, regularity and randomness. So we drifted naturally into that kind of work—looking for regularities. After all, that’s what science is about.
You once joked that your theories of quantum mechanics have no application.
To say there are no applications is probably too strong. It takes a very long time to go from this work to practical applications.
What other kinds of value do you see in this?
Understanding the universe; how it works? And everything in it? I think it’s one of the most exciting challenges to the human race.
Would you say your theories have artistic value?
It turns out that beauty and elegance are effective criteria in choosing a theory in fundamental physics.
Once CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the largest particle accelerator ever built, is up and running, they’ll be looking for the Higgs boson—the last as-yet-unseen elementary particle predicted by your theories. Stephen Hawking told the BBC, “I have a bet of $100 that we won’t find the Higgs.” Do you think we will?
Something like that has to turn up. If not, it must be something rather similar.
How much would you be willing to bet on that?
Oh, perhaps that sum would be all right. But that’s not what I’m most excited about. I’m most excited about the prospect that they will uncover some superpartners of known particles. If approximate supersymmetry is correct, there must be a companion particle for every known particle. But none has ever been seen.
You’re a person with many, varied interests. What are your favorite things in life?
I like walking in wild country, even semi-wild country, like around here. And I like bird watching—and trees and flowers and butterflies. I’m very excited about trying to conserve nature as much as possible. And interested in archaeology; Southwestern prehistoric pottery. And what else? I like ancient and medieval coins.
Do you see a common link among all these things?
These are all things I got interested in when I was very young; like, five.
You’re interested in the same things as at age five?
Pretty much. Except physics. Physics came later—at 15, 16. [Laughs]
What projects at SFI are you most active in now?
Trying to understand these distant relationships of human languages. It’s likely that a very large number of known languages are descended from a single one that was spoken maybe 15,000 years ago. Another thing I am working on, with my colleague James Hartle of UC Santa Barbara, is trying to describe quantum mechanics in a sensible way.
To communicate it clearly?
So it’s not so weird. People emphasize this alleged weirdness. I don’t believe it’s weird. It’s just quantum mechanics.
What stands out as the most astonishing or fulfilling thing you’ve learned in your life?
That’s very hard to say. Suddenly realizing that the neutrons and protons were not, as everybody thought, elementary—that they were made up of quarks!—was quite a thrill. Starting this institute was particularly fulfilling; I didn’t do it myself. And as a director of the MacArthur Foundation, I was able to help start the World Resources Institute, a conservation-policy organization. That was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
What remains your greatest unanswered question?
I’m curious to know whether we really are approaching a theory of all the particles and forces.
A theory of everything?
Not everything! It’s completely wrong to call it a theory of everything, because quantum mechanics gives only probabilities for various alternative histories of the universe.
What do you think the chances are that we are alone in the universe?
How could that possibly be? I think it’s for sure that we’re not alone. The universe is so vast. The real question is, “How close are the nearest whatever-it-is-you’re-asking-about?”
[Intercom speaker: “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. . . .”]
Oh, it’s time? We gotta have tea. We set this place up so voluntary associations can start at tea or lunch. People start talking about things. Somebody has a problem; somebody has a solution; they come together.
