Quark founder and Nobel Prize winner passes away

Gell-Mann, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969, developed the theory of quarks, the elementary particles within hadrons such as protons and neutrons.

Together with and Israeli physicist Yuval Ne’eman, he also proposed the Eightfold Way, a scheme for ordering subatomic particles based on the mathematical symmetry SU(3).

Thomas Rosenbaum, president at Caltech, which Gell-Mann joined in 1955, said: “A polymath, a discerner of Nature’s fundamental patterns, and, as such, an expositor for the connections of physics to other disciplines, Murray helped define the approaches of generations of scientists.”

Quarks – which Gell-Mann named after a line in Finnegans Wake — can’t be seen individually, not dislodged from the larger particles that they inhibit. However, the existence of quarks was demonstrated in the late 1960s by experiments at the Standford Linear Accelerator Center.

A particle predicted by Gell-Mann, the “pentaquark”, composed of five quarks, was confirmed at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider earlier this year.

Gell-Mann also developed Quantum Chromodynamics, the fundamental theory describing the strong interaction between quarks and gluons.

As well as his work at Celtech, Gell-Mann also lectured at CERN in the early 1970s and co-founded the Santa Fe Institute in 1984.

But as a boy, Gell Mann had to be persuaded to study physics by his father. It was, he said, “the only course in which I did badly in high school, and hated it. But after a while I got to like it.

“If a child grows up to be a scientist,” he later said, “he finds that he is paid to play all day at the most exciting game ever devised by mankind.”

Murray Gell Mann passed away on Friday, May 24, at his home in New Mexico.