My First Strange Encounter with Murray Gell-Mann

Credit line: Harvey of Pasadena, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection Long ago when I was working as a police reporter at the Albuquerque Journal, my best friend Richard Freedman called to deliver some exciting news: Murray Gell-Mann was giving a public lecture that evening up in Los Alamos, the city high in the Jemez Mountains where the atomic bomb was devised. Having made less than optimal use of our undergraduate education, Richard and I were studying new subjects like mad. Physics, philosophy, linear algebra -- we were sure that somewhere therein lay the secret of the universe. In school I hadn’t got past Physics 101 and an introduction to western philosophy. But throughout those years I had fallen in love with the literature of science-- books like George Gamow's Thirty Years That Shook Physics, Arthur Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World, and The Universe and Dr. Einstein, Lincoln Barnett's wonderful treatment of special and general relativity. I knew that the basic constituents of matter were quarks and that the man who had discovered them was Gell-Mann. It would have been wonderful to see this visionary in person -- perhaps the greatest genius of the atomic age. (He would have looked much as he does in the picture at the top of this post.) But I was working the nightshift at the newspaper, and Los Alamos was a slow, 100-mile drive. For a combination of bad reasons, including inertia, I passed the opportunity by. When I finally met Gell-Mann, approximately 15 years later, we got off to a bad start. By now I was working at the New York Times and I took a year’s leave of absence to move to Santa Fe and write Fire in the Mind. I was starting to spend time at the Santa Fe Institute, which was devoted to the emerging (and still emerging) sciences of complexity and where Gell-Mann was one of the most prominent thinkers. It was only a matter of time before our paths crossed. The opportunity came one afternoon at Sol y Sombra, a magnificent estate on the outskirts of town that was occupied by Georgia O’Keefe in her dying days and, last I heard, is owned by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen. The institute was holding a conference on the lush, rolling grounds. (Sol y Sombra means sun and shade.) I walked into the meeting room and spotted Gell-Mann at the seminar table -- "his full head of tightly packed white hair, his styleless glasses with black plastic frames." That description is from the prologue of the biography I would later write: Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics. The scene continues: