Professor Murray Gell-Mann of Caltech, the fifty-five-year-old enfant terrible of particle physics. Gell-Mann had called up Cowan about a week before the August 17 meeting, saying that Pines had told him about the institute idea. Gell-Mann thought it was fantastic. He’d been wanting to do something like this all his life, he said. He wanted to tackle problems like the rise and fall of ancient civilizations and the long-term sustainability of our own civilization—problems that would transcend the disciplinary boundaries in a big way. He’d had no success whatsoever getting anything started at
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