It is no accident that the quark—the building block of protons and neutrons and, by extension, of you and everything around you—has such a strange and charming name. The physicist who discovered it, Murray Gell-Mann, loves words as much as he loves physics. He is known to correct a stranger’s pronunciation of his or her own last name (which doesn’t always go over well) and is more than happy to give names to objects or ideas that do not have one yet. Thus came the word quark for his most famous discovery. It sounds like “kwork” and got its spelling from a whimsical poem in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. This highly scientific term is clever and jokey and gruff all at once, much like the man who coined it.
Gell-Mann’s obsession with words dates to his youth, when his fascination with linguistics, natural history, and archaeology helped him understand the diversity of the world. The native New Yorker skipped three grades in elementary school and entered college early. After zipping through Yale and MIT, Gell-Mann was just 21 when he began his postdoc work at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, back when Albert Einstein was still strolling the campus. Gell-Mann later worked with Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago, and he debated passionately with renowned physicist Richard Feynman during his many years at Caltech.
It was at Caltech that Gell-Mann helped to lay the foundations for our understanding of the components that make up matter. He drafted a blueprint of subatomic physics that he called the Eightfold Way. At the time, physicists understood that atoms are constructed from protons and neutrons, but they had also found many other mysterious particles. The Eightfold Way made sense of this baffling menagerie, finding within it places for particles never even imagined. The work was so important that it netted Gell-Mann a Nobel Prize in 1969.
In 1984 Gell-Mann pursued his dream of working in other fields by cofounding the Santa Fe Institute, a think tank where scientists are encouraged to cross disciplines. Located high on a hill in the New Mexico desert, surrounded by cottonwood trees and outcroppings of rose quartz, the institute is a place where an ornithologist can trade data over lunch with a political scientist while excitedly scrawling statistical equations on a window with a Sharpie for lack of paper and pen. With its geometric design, brightly colored walls, abundant hiking trails in the vicinity, and generous supply of candy in the kitchen, the Santa Fe Institute seems a bit like a playground for scientists.
DISCOVER contributing editor Susan Kruglinski recently sat with Gell-Mann among the oversize leather couches in the institute’s cozy library to talk about what it is like to have lived the history of modern physics.
