Nuclear Physics: Order in the Zoo

The 15-year-old Yale freshman wanted to study archaeology, but his father thought engineering was a more promising profession. “I couldn’t stand engineering,” recalls Caltech’s Professor Murray Gell-Mann, the former child prodigy, “so I put down the closest thing, physics.” It was a happy choice. Last week, for his brilliant work on the basic nature of the atom, Gell-Mann, now 40, won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics.

In the early 1950s, when Gell-Mann made his debut as a theoretical physicist, the discovery of a host of strange and short-lived bits of matter had turned the once orderly world of subatomic physics into what scientists called a “zoo.” To bring some order out of the chaos, Gell-Mann—at the age of 24 —formulated his Theory of Strangeness (named after Francis Bacon’s line: “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion”). He assigned a value to each of the puzzling new particles: a “strangeness” number based on their peculiar rate of decay. His analysis established a new and logical relationship between the particles and showed how they interacted.

The Eightfold Way. From strangeness, Gell-Mann and Israeli Physicist Yuval Ne’eman progressed to a new theory that Gell-Mann named the “eightfold way” (after the eight ways that Buddhists use to stop pain). It organized the particles into groups of eight or ten members. To fill gaps in his table, he postulated yet unencountered particles. In 1964, his theory was strong]y confirmed by the discovery of a bit of matter that Gell-Mann had previously described: the omega-minus particle.

Probing deeper into the secrets of the atom, Gell-Mann and Physicist George Zweig then independently conceived a trio of basic building blocks out of which all the other particles —and, indeed, all matter—could be constructed. With his usual literary flair, Gell-Mann named these imaginary particles “quarks” (from James Joyce’s cryptic line in Finnegans Wake: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!”). Gell-Mann cautioned that quarks might not exist outside his equations, but an Australian researcher recently reported finding them among the debris of atmospheric atoms broken up by cosmic rays (TIME, Sept. 12). Even if quarks are only a mathematical fiction, however, there is no doubt that their creator has brought man closer than ever to a fundamental understanding of matter.

. . .

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry meanwhile went to Britain’s Derek H.R. Barton, 51, and Norway’s Odd Hassel, 72. for their discovery and application of the so-called “conformation concept.” Their findings have proven valuable in the synthesis of new drugs and other compounds.