Marvin “Murph” Goldberger, a former student of Enrico Fermi’s, headed the group, which included Murray Gell-Mann and Steven Weinberg, both young physicists who would go on to win Nobel Prizes. Members of the group would meet for several weeks over the summer and then report back to ARPA. With help from Charles Townes, who would also later win the Nobel Prize for his work on the maser, the group was established under the auspices of the Institute for Defense Analyses, the research institute that had been supplying much of ARPA’s technical talent.
