Albert Einstein didn't care much for Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived and worked at the Institute for Advanced Studies during the twilight of his career. He had little good to say about the place, describing it in a letter to his friend, the Queen of Belgium, as a "quaint, ceremonious village of puny demigods on stilts".
Yet even demigods on stilts stand taller than mere mortals, and many of the greatest demigods of modern science passed through the portals of the Institute, not least amongst them, Einstein himself. Another demigod, perhaps less well known publicly but a champion amongst the scientific community who pursued advanced science at the Institute, was one Murray Gell-Mann, the physicist who redefined particle physics during the latter half of this century.
Particle physics concerns itself with the secret, miniature events that take place inside atoms. What holds them together, what happens when they split, where the energy goes and what are their constituent parts. It is an exotic and cerebral world where "strangeness" is an acceptable technical term and particles can be named for their flavour and colour.
It is a place that can't be seen, and where physicists are forced to imagine what must be happening long before they can devise experiments to prove that the theories are true. This is the realm through which GellMann strode like a colossus - or, perhaps, a demigod. He dominated particle physics from the 1950s to the 1970s, originating such fundamental concepts as the quark and devising ways of unifying existing theories with his new discoveries.
Gell-Mann was a bundle of contradictions, however, as Johnson makes clear in this fine biography. The son of Jewish immigrants who settled in New York but who weren't particularly interested in their Jewishness, the boy Murray struggled with the poverty faced by the family, particularly after the crash of 1929. They lived in the rough end of Manhattan and moved up or down the ladder as their financial circumstances waxed and waned.
Murray was always an exception, however. He graduated from high school at 14 and from Yale University when he was 18. By the time he was 21 he had a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was ready to take on the science world. He entered the scene when so many of the scientific greats of the 20th century were still working, including giants such as Einstein, Fermi and Oppenheimer. Yet allied with a sparkling intellect was an intellectual egotism that made him famous amongst his peers.
"Over the years colleagues had been left dumbfounded by how self-centred the man could be," writes Johnson, who adds that Gell-Mann at his worst came off as a bully. "Everyone who knew him had seen the classic pose: say something wrong or ask an ignorant question and he would raise his eyebrows in mock astonishment, then groan, holding hand to wrinkled brow as if his head were about to explode from the sheer weight of your misapprehension."
He was also a show-off and delighted in letting people know how much he knew. He was a genuine wizard at languages and regularly ordered in Chinese when he and his friends attended ethnic restaurants. But there was no denying the quality of his mind. Oppenheimer himself described GellMann as "one of the most brilliant, if not the most brilliant, of the small handful of young experts in theoretical particle physics", this in the years before Gell-Mann even began to have an international impact on the science.
He jealously defended his achievements even if some question remained over their provenance. For example, he chose the name quark to describe the family of particles he discovered, a word that appears in Joyce's Finnegans Wake: "Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he hasn't got much of a bark. And sure any he has it's all beside the mark."
Yet Gell-Mann later reminded people that he had not actually taken the name from Joyce's work. "The sound of the name, `kwork', Murray wanted the world to know, was an entirely original invention. He just wasn't sure how to spell it until he stumbled upon the now-famous line in a first edition of Finnegans Wake that belonged to his older brother," writes Johnson.
Gell-Mann's biographer never allows us to actually get around to disliking the scientist, however, a testament to the quality of Johnson's work. This is a remarkably well written book, bringing the reader along as through a good novel and near effortlessly explaining some of the most complicated science in the world. It allows us to see Gell-Mann as he appeared to those around him, but also to understand the significance of his achievements and the stunning quality of his mind. Even if Gell-Mann could somehow be distilled out of the book it would remain as a useful history of particle physics and an explanatory guide to life inside the atom.
Dick Ahlstrom is Science Editor of The Irish Times.
