Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics [Paperback]

With a New Afterword

Our knowledge of fundamental physics contains not one fruitful idea that does not carry the name of Murray Gell-Mann. --Richard Feynman

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.  

Born into a Jewish immigrant family on New York's East 14th Street, Gell-Mann's prodigious talent was evident from an early age--he entered Yale at 15, completed his Ph.D. at 21, and was soon identifying the structures of the world's smallest components and illuminating the elegant symmetries of the universe.

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."A multidimensional portrait of a brilliant but tormented man who dominated elementary physics for twenty years... An almost Shakespearean hero."--The New York Times Book Review

"Skillfully and engagingly written."--ScienceGeorge Johnson covers science for The New York Times. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.It was Memorial Day weekend of 1996, in the middle of what turned out to be one of New Mexico's worst droughts of the century. The seemingly endless dry spell reminded many of the climatic disaster said to have driven the Anasazi, the original inhabitants of this land, from their stone settlements around Mesa Verde, causing the collapse of a civilization. To escape the heat, I left my house in Santa Fe and drove as high as you can go into the nearby Sangre de Cristo Mountains. After leavil³g