Gell-Mann, Murray (gĕl`-män), 1929–, American theoretical physicist, b. New York City, grad. Yale 1948, Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1951. In 1953, he and the Japanese team of T. Nakano and Kazuhiko Nishijima independently proposed the concept of "strangeness" to account for certain particle-decay patterns; strangeness became the foundation for later symmetry studies. In 1961, Gell-Mann and Israeli physicist Yuval Ne'eman independently introduced the "eightfold way," or SU(3) symmetry, a tablelike ordering of all subatomic particles analogous to the ordering of the elements in the periodic table periodic table, chart of the elements arranged according to the periodic law discovered by Dmitri I. Mendeleev and revised by Henry G. J. Moseley . In the periodic table the elements are arranged in columns and rows according to increasing atomic number (see the
..... Click the link for more information. . The 1964 discovery of the omega-minus particle, which filled a gap in this ordering, brought the theory wide acceptance and led to Gell-Mann's being awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize for Physics. In 1963, Gell-Mann and American physicist George Zweig independently postulated the existence of the quark, an even more fundamental elementary particle elementary particles, the most basic physical constituents of the universe.

Basic Constituents of Matter

Molecules are built up from the atom , which is the basic unit of any chemical element .
..... Click the link for more information. with a fractional electric charge; quarks are confined in protons, neutrons, and other particles by forces associated with the exchange of gluons gluon, an elementary particle that mediates, or carries, the strong, or nuclear, force. In quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the quantum field theory of strong interactions , the interaction of quarks (to form protons , neutrons , and other elementary particles ) is
..... Click the link for more information. . Gell-Mann and others later constructed the quantum field theory quantum field theory, study of the quantum mechanical interaction of elementary particles and fields . Quantum field theory applied to the understanding of electromagnetism is called quantum electrodynamics (QED), and it has proved spectacularly successful in
..... Click the link for more information. of quarks and gluons called quantum chromodynamics quantum chromodynamics (QCD), quantum field theory that describes the properties of the strong interactions between quarks and between protons and neutrons in the framework of quantum theory .
..... Click the link for more information. (QCD). Gell-Mann's interests have extended to the study of complexity complexity, in science, field of study devoted to the process of self-organization. The basic concept of complexity is that all things tend to organize themselves into patterns, e.g.
..... Click the link for more information. , and he is the director of physics at the Santa Fe Institute, which he helped found in 1984. He has written The Eightfold Way in collaboration with Ne'eman (1964), Broken Scale Invariance and the Light Cone with Kenneth G. Wilson (1971), and The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and Complex (1984).

Bibliography

See biography by G. Johnson (1999).

Gell-Mann, Murray

(born Sept. 15, 1929, New York, N.Y., U.S.) U.S. physicist. He entered Yale University at 15 and earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951. From 1955 he taught at the California Institute of Technology, becoming Millikan professor of theoretical physics in 1967. In 1953 he introduced the concept of “strangeness,” a quantum property that accounted for decay patterns of certain mesons. In 1961 he and Yuval Ne'eman (b. 1925) proposed a scheme (the “Eightfold Way”) that grouped mesons and baryons into multiplets of 1, 8, 10, or 27 members on the basis of various properties. He speculated that it was possible to explain certain properties of known particles in terms of even more fundamental particles, or building blocks, which he later called quarks. He was awarded a 1969 Nobel Prize.

Gell-Mann, Murray (1929– ) physicist; born in New York City. While at the University of Chicago (1952–55), he formulated new physical laws to explain apparently anomalous behavior for newly created subatomic particles. At the California Institute of Technology (1955), he organized these "strange" particles into eight-member "families" consisting of fractionally charged particles, which he named "quarks" (after a word in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake). He received the 1969 Nobel Prize for these revolutionary contributions to particle physics. He continued his studies of quantum mechanics, dispersion theory, and theories of strong and weak particle interactions.