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Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Physics
Acclaimed science writer George Johnson brings his formidable reporting skills to the first biography of Nobel Prize-winner Murray Gell-Mann, the brilliant, irascible man who revolutionized modern particle physics with his models of the quark and the Eightfold Way.
Beautifully balanced in its portrayal of an extraordinary and difficult man, interpreting the concepts of advanced physics with scrupulous clarity and simplicity, Strange Beauty is a tour de force of both science writing and biography. This updated edition, with a new foreword by Douglas Hofstadter, includes reflections on the final years of Gell-Mann’s life and his influence on the Santa Fe Institute.
Beautifully balanced in its portrayal of an extraordinary and difficult man, interpreting the concepts of advanced physics with scrupulous clarity and simplicity, Strange Beauty is a tour de force of both science writing and biography. This updated edition, with a new foreword by Douglas Hofstadter, includes reflections on the final years of Gell-Mann’s life and his influence on the Santa Fe Institute.
608 pages, Paperback
Published November 3, 2023
About the author
George Johnson
287 books50 followersLibrarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
George Johnson (born January 20, 1952) is an American journalist and science writer. He is the author of a number of books, including The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments (2008) and Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics (1999), and writes for a number of publications, including The New York Times.
He is one of the co-hosts (with science writer John Horgan) of "Science Saturday", a weekly discussion on the website Bloggingheads.tv, related to topics in science. Several prominent scientists, philosophers, and bloggers have been interviewed for the site.
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
George Johnson (born January 20, 1952) is an American journalist and science writer. He is the author of a number of books, including The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments (2008) and Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics (1999), and writes for a number of publications, including The New York Times.
He is one of the co-hosts (with science writer John Horgan) of "Science Saturday", a weekly discussion on the website Bloggingheads.tv, related to topics in science. Several prominent scientists, philosophers, and bloggers have been interviewed for the site.
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Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
December 5, 2023
This is a second edition of a scientific biography of the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann, first published in 1999. This edition adds in the remaining 20 years of Gell-Mann's life. Like most scientists, his contributions may not have been as outstanding in his later years, but it gives the complete picture - and he certainly continued to be interesting as a person.
George Johnson (who clearly like a touch of scientific beauty, having previously written The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments) does a good job of taking us into both the world and work of Gell-Mann. Not a household name, but one of the greats of twentieth century physics. Part of the problem, compared with the science that came before - even most of Einstein's - was that, as Johnson puts it, Gell-Mann's 'discoveries were not of things but of patterns - mathematical symmetries that seemed to reflect, in some ultimately mysterious way, the manner in which subatomic particles behaved.'
Unlike most biographies, the opening does not start by describing the ancestry of the scientist, but rather tries to untangle the etymology of Gell-Mann's surname (in part, probably because he was consistently vague about it). Johnson notes that his older brother's surname was Gelman - the immediate assumption being that the egotistical Gell-Mann and adopted a grandiose surname, had it not been that his father's name was found in a phone book as also being Gell-Mann, which he adapted from Gellmann (yet another spelling). Johnson does uncover some ancestral details, but there is always the feeling that he is uncovering pieces of a puzzle that can seem as intricate and abstruse as the 'Eight-fold way' Gell-Mann devised for particle physics.
There are a number of ways of constructing a scientific biography that digs below the surface level of the physics as this does. A popular approach is to alternate chapters on the science and on the personal life. Johnson opts to integrate the two. I can see why this appeals contextually, but I think it makes it harder to get your head around what will always be a hard-to-grasp set of concepts. It's not just because the science is broken up, but also because we see the gradual development of the theory in snippets it can be hard to keep track from chapter to chapter as small steps forward and some reverses are dropped into the mix. It is entirely possible to pick up what you are being told, but it can be hard work to stay on top of it - I found I had to reread several sets of pages. However, Johnson's handling of Gell-Mann's professional and personal life is sufficiently engaging that there is always something to keep you going.
As I often have to say these days, it's too long at over 500 pages before getting to the notes and such. It has proved possible to write excellent scientific biographies of the likes of Newton, Einstein and Feynman at a far more practical length, so it's not a matter of coping with either a vast scientific output or a complicated personal life. It might seem odd as surely more words is more work to produce, but it feels lazy not to edit it to a more readable length. On the upside, though, for the output of an academic press, the book is very reasonably priced.
Overall, Johnson makes it clear that we have in Gell-Mann both an impressive contribution to physics and a life well worth exploring.
George Johnson (who clearly like a touch of scientific beauty, having previously written The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments) does a good job of taking us into both the world and work of Gell-Mann. Not a household name, but one of the greats of twentieth century physics. Part of the problem, compared with the science that came before - even most of Einstein's - was that, as Johnson puts it, Gell-Mann's 'discoveries were not of things but of patterns - mathematical symmetries that seemed to reflect, in some ultimately mysterious way, the manner in which subatomic particles behaved.'
Unlike most biographies, the opening does not start by describing the ancestry of the scientist, but rather tries to untangle the etymology of Gell-Mann's surname (in part, probably because he was consistently vague about it). Johnson notes that his older brother's surname was Gelman - the immediate assumption being that the egotistical Gell-Mann and adopted a grandiose surname, had it not been that his father's name was found in a phone book as also being Gell-Mann, which he adapted from Gellmann (yet another spelling). Johnson does uncover some ancestral details, but there is always the feeling that he is uncovering pieces of a puzzle that can seem as intricate and abstruse as the 'Eight-fold way' Gell-Mann devised for particle physics.
There are a number of ways of constructing a scientific biography that digs below the surface level of the physics as this does. A popular approach is to alternate chapters on the science and on the personal life. Johnson opts to integrate the two. I can see why this appeals contextually, but I think it makes it harder to get your head around what will always be a hard-to-grasp set of concepts. It's not just because the science is broken up, but also because we see the gradual development of the theory in snippets it can be hard to keep track from chapter to chapter as small steps forward and some reverses are dropped into the mix. It is entirely possible to pick up what you are being told, but it can be hard work to stay on top of it - I found I had to reread several sets of pages. However, Johnson's handling of Gell-Mann's professional and personal life is sufficiently engaging that there is always something to keep you going.
As I often have to say these days, it's too long at over 500 pages before getting to the notes and such. It has proved possible to write excellent scientific biographies of the likes of Newton, Einstein and Feynman at a far more practical length, so it's not a matter of coping with either a vast scientific output or a complicated personal life. It might seem odd as surely more words is more work to produce, but it feels lazy not to edit it to a more readable length. On the upside, though, for the output of an academic press, the book is very reasonably priced.
Overall, Johnson makes it clear that we have in Gell-Mann both an impressive contribution to physics and a life well worth exploring.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review