Murray Gell-Mann
Posted in Events dear boy. Events, Physics at 12:00 on 6 June 2019
For those of you who haven’t heard of him Murray Gell-Mann was to the forefront in the field of elementary particle Physics in the mid-twentieth century.
He died on May 24th and his Guardian obituary is here.
It was Gell-Mann who named the building blocks of hadrons as “quarks” after a sentence from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. He also dubbed the classification system for hadrons as the “eightfold way” in a nod to Buddhism.
Who says scientists aren’t widely read?
Murray Gell-Mann: 15/9/1929 – May 24/5/2019. So it goes.
Tags: Buddhism, eightfold way, Finnegan's Wake, hadrons, James Joyce, Murray Gell-Mann, quarks
