Murray Gell-Mann Interview (page: 3 / 8) Developer of the Quark Theory	Print Interview

You've said that your brother encouraged your curiosity about the world. What about your parents? How much direction did they give you?

Murray Gell-Mann: Well, my mother didn't have much to do with that sort of thing. My father was probably happy that I was learning things, but he wasn't the sort of person to give a lot of encouragement. He actively discouraged the natural history expeditions. He didn't like that sort of thing. I never figured out exactly why. I think maybe it was because he grew up in the back woods. His father was a forester in an extremely remote area of what was then the Austrian Empire. I think he was so glad to get into a city, he never wanted to leave, and didn't like the idea of my poking around in the woods and the swamps. Also, in my brother's case it distracted him from school. He was a college drop out at the age of 15 because he was so passionately interest in the woods, particularly birds. So that may also have played a role. But I think the hostility may have come earlier than that.

Your brother dropped out of college at age 15? That means he started before age 15.

Murray Gell-Mann: Yes.

You also began college at age 15.

Murray Gell-Mann: But I didn't drop out.

You stuck with it. How do you account for the fact that both you and your brother began college two or three years before most of your peers?

Murray Gell-Mann: Well, it's a matter of fashion, whether the schools like to promote people rapidly -- if they show a capacity for being promoted rapidly -- or not. Sometimes the prevailing educational philosophy is that you have to leave people with their age group, and sometimes it is that you don't, that you promote them. But at that time, skipping, as it was called, was popular. Shortly, the schools mostly stopped doing that.

Did they think it was bad for the student?

Murray Gell-Mann: For whatever reason. One system is to leave kids in the class with the kids their own age but give them a lot of advanced material to work on. But then it matters whether they have to do their regular dull class work as well. If they're excused from the usual stuff, and sit in the back of the room doing calculus, I think that's better than having to do the usual junk, plus material for enrichment. The other, I think, is terrible. Doing all this stuff that they learned years before and that they know perfectly -- and it is true drudgery -- plus material for so-called "enrichment." I think that is an extremely poor plan.

Were you bored at all in school, or did they allow you to move fast?

Murray Gell-Mann: I skipped enough so that I wasn't completely bored. I usually learned the stuff right away, or at least often. I shouldn't say usually. In many classes I learned a lot of the things in the beginning, but there were others where it continued to be interesting all through the year, history class for example. We happened to have a very high quality history teacher in grade school. It was shortly after that he became chairman of the history department at Barnard, but at that time, during the Depression, he was teaching grade school. I didn't at the time like him particularly, but he was certainly a very good teacher. Later on I liked him, and just at the end of his life we got to know each other.

What kind of conversations did you have with him at the end of his life?

Murray Gell-Mann: Oh, we talked about lots of things that we had done in between. He was writing a history of President Franklin Roosevelt's dealings in foreign affairs, particularly in connection with Indochina. He was astonished that I knew some things about that. So we talked about it and it was very interesting. He wrote a lot of books, he did a lot of scholarly work. He was a rather well-known historian.

You moved through school so quickly, you obviously were very bright and picked up things much more quickly than some of your classmates. How did you get along with other students when you were in school?

Murray Gell-Mann: Oh, it varied a lot. It got better and better as time went on. High school wasn't bad at all. Grammar school wasn't so great. It got better in high school. Going to college, similarly, it was not perfect in the beginning, but later on it was very good. I made a lot of wonderful friends, many of whom I still know and see.

What was the problem in grammar school?

Murray Gell-Mann: Well, when I would just arrive, the others knew one another, and I was much younger, and much smaller, and couldn't play the games so well. So I wasn't very popular, but over the years it got better.

Was that because popularity gets defined in different kinds of terms?

Murray Gell-Mann: Well, among kids it gets defined in sort of ridiculous terms, which have almost nothing to do with success in later life. It's really sort of funny.

You often see stories where the person who was the most popular in high school is among the least successful later in life.

Murray Gell-Mann: That's right, often true. So all of that hierarchy in school is sort of absurd in many cases.

You mentioned a number of writers who interested you as a boy. What about H.G. Wells? A number of our interviewees have mentioned him.

Murray Gell-Mann: Well, he and many lesser writers of so called science fiction dealt with the future, and that was interesting, because the future is fascinating. And in most serious literature, one didn't see much discussion of it. You remember the Ibsen play (Hedda Gabler) where there are two historians, the woman's husband, who was a rather conventional historian, and her lover, who was a more daring one. The daring historian's book goes right on into the future. The other historian says, "But what can we know of the future?" and the writer says, "Well, there is thing or two to be said about it. We don't know about it but there is a thing or two to be said about it just the same." So, many scientists have gotten into science through science fiction, I think that's true. Another thing is that -- not particularly true about H. G. Wells, but it was true about some of the science fiction magazines -- that they discussed active questions in science, where the books you could get in the library and so on were mostly very far out of date, and did not discuss active questions. Even in college, I found that I couldn't get anybody to talk with me about contemporary questions.

Really? Why?

Murray Gell-Mann: It was a difficult time. It was during the war, and most of the best people were away. But even after the war ,when they came back, it was still very difficult to get people to discuss active research questions. There's this idea that students aren't good enough to know about what is going on in science. They should be told some old stuff. But as time goes on, items in the curriculum will move down to a more elementary class, as it gets easier to talk about. But the new ideas are usually put out of reach of the students.

So students get told the old stuff, sort of an intellectual version of hand-me-downs?

Murray Gell-Mann: Something like that, yes. Exactly. It's a funny custom which I don't particularly approve of. I don't know why they can't be told about the latest stuff. I don't see that it does any harm to tell them about it. You may not be able to tell it to them in its full glory, but you could tell them a lot about what is going on. I don't know why that's so bad.

Do you think there is the notion that they haven't spent enough time? That they haven't paid their dues enough?

Murray Gell-Mann: Perhaps. I don't know. It's very hard to plumb the depths of people's motivation. But possibly something like that. Certainly, as notation improves, it gets easier to teach things to more elementary students. I'm sure, in Roman times, that multiplication with roman numerals was a graduate subject. As people learned better notations, it became easier to teach multiplication. They were able to move it down in the curriculum.

You mentioned your interest in archeology, and being a linguist, and so forth. Was there anything else that you wanted to be, that you didn't get to?

Murray Gell-Mann: Explorer. But, I've done little bits of those things recently, and that's rather fun. But I never really became an archeologist, or a linguist or an explorer.

You said that when you first began studying physics, you found some things that were a little more inspiring than the basic textbook physic.

Murray Gell-Mann: Well, specifically, quantum mechanics and relativity. What my father had said would be interesting, turned out actually to be interesting. So on that he was right.

What was it that interested you about relativity and quantum mechanics?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Murray Gell-Mann: They are just some of the greatest achievements of the human mind. Relativity, quantum mechanics, they are spectacularly interesting things. And of course they opened up the question of how general relativity and quantum mechanics would be combined together in a successful theory. For that, we have now, here at Caltech, and elsewhere, the first candidate theory in history for a unified quantum field theory of all the particles and all their interactions which does actually reconcile quantum mechanics to general relativity. Whether it's right or not, we don't yet know, but it is spectacularly exciting, and for the first time in history it is a candidate theory that seems to have the right properties to be the right overall theory of all the particles and all their interactions. Developed by my friend John Schwartz and his colleagues, in great part right here on this floor.

Murray Gell-Mann Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8