Murray Gell-Mann Interview (page: 7 / 8) Developer of the Quark Theory	Print Interview

By the time you received the Nobel, you had gained a great deal of fame, and attention. What impact did that have on your wife and family?

Murray Gell-Mann: My wife liked it. I knew that. She really liked it, she enjoyed the whole thing very much. Not the publicity, particularly. She was not anxious for publicity. But just the whole series of events appealed to her a great deal. We had a wonderful time going to Stockholm together. It was really nice.

Over the long term, was it something that affected your family?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Murray Gell-Mann: My daughter and my son reacted oppositely, on the morning when they notified us. You know, how you get a call from somebody. Nowadays it's from the Academy, but at that time it was from some news media, at 3:30 in the morning here in California. Well, I was pleased to hear that I had gotten this thing. I was not pleased to be deprived of my sleep, because people kept calling. And finally Margaret said we should get up and get dressed and she would make coffee, because obviously we were not going to get anymore sleep, and some reporter or photographer might be coming any minute from the Los Angeles Times. So we did, we got up, she made coffee. The reporter and photographer showed up from the Los Angeles Times. My daughter dug deeper under the covers, didn't come out for hours. She didn't want to have anything to do with any of this. But my son, who was seven years younger, he was six years old at that time, was delighted with the idea that a reporter and photographer were coming to the house. He wanted to be photographed and he had his Halloween pirate costume, because it was the day before Halloween, October 30. So he put it on, he got all dressed and put on his pirate costume and came out, and of course the Los Angeles Times photographed him! The next day, smack in the middle of the front page of the L.A. Times, in fact right on top of the front page of the L.A. Times, was Nick in his pirate costume! But it was a mixed blessing for him, because he hadn't calculated that everybody got the paper, and that everybody in his school would see his picture on the front page, and that they would kid him about it.

That was a part he hadn't anticipated.

Murray Gell-Mann: The opposite reaction of the two children was very curious.

They didn't become theoretical physicists, did they?

Murray Gell-Mann: No, I didn't particularly want either of my children to become anything in particular, anything special. Just something that would be satisfying, and if possible, something great. But not anything in particular.

You didn't want them to follow in your footsteps?

Murray Gell-Mann: Not particularly. I wouldn't have objected, but I wouldn't have wanted it particularly, either way. Anything: art, science, business, whatever.

The road to success is often a winding one. Were there particular obstacles that you encountered along the way?

Murray Gell-Mann: No, not really. Everything has always gone wonderfully for me. All the obstacles were internal. Inefficiency, neurosis, all the obstacles have been internal. I can't really think of any obstacles that were placed in my path. We've had the most wonderful things happen to me. A full scholarship to Yale, for example. Donated by somebody whom I met later, became a wonderful friend. Trini McCormick Barnes, it was called the McDill McCormick Scholarship. It was anonymous, I didn't know who had donated it. But it was Trini Barnes in memory of her brother, who had died young. And it paid for everything at Yale. All my expenses. It was an extraordinary scholarship. It was the only one like that, and it was the only one that would have permitted me to attend the University there. Fantastic luck. Then I had some trouble with graduate schools, and I hadn't wanted to go to MIT, but it turned out that MIT was splendid. Especially because of Victor Weisskopf, who was my advisor, my teacher. So that also was terrific. Everything has gone very, very well. Always. And all the difficulties have been self-generated. Except the death of my wife. That of course was tragic, and not something that I brought on.

How much impact did that have on your work?

Murray Gell-Mann: Oh, it had a lot. While she was ill, I didn't do much work, very little. After she was gone, I began to do different things.

You talk about the internal obstacles. You talked earlier about being lazy.

Murray Gell-Mann: Well, laziness isn't all. I think a great deal of neuroses of one sort or another, a great many cases of compulsive, irrational, maladapted behaviors, such as so many of us have, the reading addiction is only one part of it.

Did you worry about failing at all? Your chosen area of theoretical physics is extremely competitive.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Murray Gell-Mann: When I was a kid, when I was a graduate student, I worried about failing. And not only did I worry about failing, but I worried that if I actually did something, then it might turn out to be a failure. And if I didn't do anything, then I wouldn't have the comparison of what I was doing with what I ought to be doing. So lots of graduate students go through that. It keeps them from doing work for a while. But finally I did some things. I wrote a dissertation and I worked on other matters. The problem at that time was that I didn't understand what was new research. So a lot of ideas that I had were actually worth publishing and worth discussing with people. And I just dismissed them as trivial. I though, well, this is silly, everybody must know this, everybody must know that. In fact, they were new and not totally silly points. A lot of them actually. I had a lot of ideas which I could have simply followed up, written up, and so on. But I didn't realize what a good idea was. In fact, I've often had that problem.

Because it seems so obvious?

Murray Gell-Mann: Yes. And, you know, why bother to call attention to something, that's just some very simple idea. But actually, simple ideas are often quite important. And it frequently happens that people haven't thought of it.

It makes you wonder how many times people have dismissed things that have occurred to them.

Murray Gell-Mann: Or dismissed other people's things. Yes, it happens very often. I know it happened to me.

Other people dismissing your ideas?

Murray Gell-Mann: That too, but mainly that I dismissed them myself. I just didn't realize that they were worth mentioning to the world.

Did you also have doubts about your work along the way?

Murray Gell-Mann: I had doubts that I would ever do anything important. In certain cases that keeps you from sitting down and trying anything, because then, as long as you haven't tried, you can figure, "Well, if I had tried it would be okay." So yes, I went through a little of that in graduate school. I've had a lot of problems writing things, because I'm a perfectionist about writing. Again that I don't sit down and do it, because I worry that if I do it, it will be imperfect, but if I don't do it, I can always imagine that it would have been perfect if I had done it. So that was a problem. When I was supposed to be writing my dissertation, for example, at MIT, I read the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

It's like cleaning house right before final exams. Something you haven't done in six months, but suddenly it must be done.

Murray Gell-Mann: It must be done right away, that's right. I still do that kind of thing. It's nerve-wracking.

Do you ever get bored with your work? I get the sense that you see science as a game to some extent.

Murray Gell-Mann: If I get bored with one thing, there are always 50 other things that I'm doing. I'm involved in so many activities, I can scarcely be bored with all of them at the same time. But the easiest is to say, "Well, since I have so many things to do, I won't do any of them. I'll sit here and read this newspaper."

What do you do to keep fresh and creative, to renew yourself?

Murray Gell-Mann: Goodness, I never thought of that. Associate with good people, I think is the best thing. Associate with amusing people, lively people, people who are young, or at least young at heart. I still think of myself as 29. The principle is you pick an age you like, and stick with it. So, I'm still 29. Probably, I probably can do things better than I could then. Like walking, and climbing hills, and running. I'm probably in better shape than I was at age 29.

And you probably know more about what's important and what isn't.

Murray Gell-Mann: Yes, and if I could only act on it, everything would be great.

Other than the ones you had talked about, is there some quality, some attribute, that you have always admired in others, that you don't have.

Murray Gell-Mann: Well, I just described it. Getting things done. Some fraction of them I get done, but it's a very small fraction. It's so obvious that I could do so much more, if I didn't have all these silly problems of addictions and so forth,

On the other hand, without that breadth of interests, you might not see all the interrelationships between different fields.

Murray Gell-Mann: I guess that conceivable, but I don't think so. Another thing that would probably be a good idea would be to cut out certain things in order to devote more attention to the rest, do a thorough, good job on them.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. When your attention is fragmented too far, you can't really have deep and good ideas. If you, for example, if you try to do science, but you become deeply involved in business, let's say. Then what matters is what you think about when you wake up in the middle of the night. If you wake up in the middle of the night thinking about the balance sheet, then you are not doing science. Because science, theoretical science at least, consists of waking up in the middle of the night with an idea for your theory. In other words, the parts of the mind out of awareness are chewing on the wrong thing. And they can't chew on everything. So your creative skills are rationed in a certain sense. You can't have them in every field. And what you are really working on, you can tell, is what you wake up in the middle of the night thinking about.

What is the responsibility of scientists as you see it? What responsibility do you feel to deal with the larger problems of society, beyond the field you are in? You've certainly addressed many of them..

Murray Gell-Mann: I do a lot of that, but I think that one has to be very careful about it. First of all...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Just because somebody is a physicist doesn't mean that person has any particular understanding of society, or the future, or the way things are going, or any particular authority to discuss such matters. So one has to be careful, saying that because I won the Swedish prize in physics, I can now make a pronouncement on all sorts of political subjects and so on. I think that one has to be very careful of that. But just because one has won the Swedish prize in some scientific subject doesn't mean that one has to shut up either! It's just that one shouldn't abuse, I think, one shouldn't abuse the privilege excessively in having this sort of title by sounding off on all sorts of things without thinking deeply about them. But if one joins with colleagues from many other walks of life, many disciplines, to think deeply about some important issue facing humanity, and then one says something about it, particularly together with those other people, I think that's very good, and should be greatly encouraged. But that is quite different. But when one says something, again, it should not, I think, be excessively polemical. It can have a polemical streak to it. Otherwise it might not get much publicity, people may not pay much attention to it. I think that scientists have some responsibility to make more or less responsible statements about things, rather than things that are merely shrill and polemical. And, also, they should initiate wherever possible, together with these colleagues from many other fields, serious discussions and serious research on issues facing the world. Not just off-the-cuff pronouncements. And anyway, that is what I have tried to do. I have tried to help organize such efforts to think deeply about things, together with colleagues from a great many sectors.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

Do you feel there's been too little of that?

Murray Gell-Mann: Much too little.

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