#contemporary physics

[litscienceculture]

Physics progresses most when it’s presented with paradoxes.

Lawrence Krauss, In Search of Nothing [x]

[tumblngphilopoet]

It's the birthday of physicist Murray Gell-Mann (books by this author), born in New York City (1929). A child prodigy, he entered Yale at age 15 and earned his Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 1951. He was researching subatomic particles during the 1950s and '60s, a time when so many new particles were discovered that people began referring to them as a "particle zoo." He developed a way to categorize the composite particles known as hadrons into eight separate types, and he called this the Eightfold Way, after the Buddhist Eightfold Path. He also theorized that hadrons were made up of three parts, and each part held a fraction of the hadron's total electric charge. He christened these smaller particles "quarks." He got the name from a line in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!" He won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1969. Gell-Mann has been called "the man with five brains" because his interests are so varied. In addition to his work in physics, he has helped organize an environmental studies program sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. He is also an expert on historical linguistics, and co-founded the Evolution of Human Languages Project at the Santa Fe Institute. In his spare time, he's a rancher, a birdwatcher, and a collector of antiquities. He's the author of numerous scientific articles and books, including The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex (1995).

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2012/09/15