Murray Gell-Mann took the word quark from a line of James Joyce
When Murray Gell-Mann proposed in 1964 that protons and neutrons are built from smaller pieces, he needed a name. He borrowed one from Finnegans Wake: three quarks for Muster Mark. A rival physicist had called them aces, but quark stuck, and a Nobel Prize followed five years later.
Gell-Mann was born on September 15, 1929, in Lower Manhattan to Jewish immigrants from Czernowitz; his father taught English to newcomers. He finished school as valedictorian at 14 and went to Yale, where his team took second prize in the 1947 Putnam mathematics competition. Rejected by Princeton and offered no money by Harvard, he went reluctantly to MIT as Victor Weisskopf's assistant, earning his doctorate in 1951.
In the 1950s cosmic rays were turning up puzzling new particles. To sort them, Gell-Mann proposed a quantity he called strangeness, kept intact by strong and electromagnetic forces but not by the weak force. With Richard Feynman he worked out how the weak interaction treats left and right differently. Then, after a conversation with the mathematician Richard Block at Caltech in 1960, he arranged the heavy particles into families of eight. He called it the eightfold way, after the Buddhist Eightfold Path; Yuval Ne'eman reached a similar scheme independently.
Quarks, proposed in parallel by George Zweig, explained why those families existed. In 1972 Gell-Mann and colleagues coined the name quantum chromodynamics for the theory of how quarks bind through a property labelled colour, now a large part of the Standard Model. He also helped propose the seesaw explanation for neutrino masses and kept string theory alive when few cared about it.
Gell-Mann taught at Caltech from 1955 to 1993 and in 1984 co-founded the Santa Fe Institute to study complex systems. His curiosity ranged across archaeology, coins, birdwatching and the evolution of languages; novelist Cormac McCarthy said losing him was like losing an encyclopedia. He died at home in Santa Fe on May 24, 2019.
Source: Murray Gell-Mann
