A GENIUS, YES, BUT DON'T LET HIM NEAR A CAR

Author: By David L. Chandler, Globe Staff

Date: Monday, May 9, 1994
Page: 25
Section: HEALTH AND SCIENCE

Gell-Mann is the inventor of what is now a cornerstone of the accepted theory of the basic nature of matter -- the idea that the cores of atoms are made of triplets of particles called quarks. His theory received a final bit of support two weeks ago when a team of physicists from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory found evidence for the sixth, and probably last, type of quark, called the "top."

Frederik Zachariasen, who co-authored several early scientific papers with Gell-Mann at the California Institute of Technology, says of his fellow physicist's intellect that he is "like me only 100 times better."

Except when it comes to cars.

On a camping trip in Mexico years ago, Zachariasen recalls, Gell-Mann decided to check his car's oil; he asked to borrow a dipstick. Told his car had its own dipstick, Gell-Mann went off to have a look. He decided to add some oil. Moments later, Zachariasen discovered that Gell-Mann had removed the car's air filter and was about to pour a quart of oil straight into the carburetor -- something most drivers know would ruin the engine. He was stopped in the nick of time.

"He doesn't like to admit his ignorance," Zachariasen explains. Gell-Mann is quite convinced that he knows everything, but there are a few things, apparently, he doesn't know.

Considering how much he does know, this is comforting news for the rest of us.

Gell-Mann speaks at least 13 languages fluently and knows a smattering of dozens of others. He won an unshared Nobel Prize for his theory of the symmetries of subatomic particles, a theory he conceived before he arrived at the quark concept. Some think he deserves a second Nobel for the quark.

He's an eccomplished birdwatcher who has observed species all around the world, a connoisseur of wild mushrooms, a student of the archeology of the American Southwest. He has a photographic memory that allows him to retain virtually everything he has read. His light reading -- and the inspiration for some of his physics terminology -- ranges from James Joyce to ancient Buddhist texts.

He has also had an abiding and long-term passion for the environment and conservation and was one of the founders of the nonprofit World Resources Institute. His enthusiasm for both theoretical physics and environmental protection led Peter Seligman, head of Conservation International, to declare that "Murray is a man with his head in the sky and his feet in the mud." He has been a director of the MacArthur Foundation, which gives out so-called ''genius grants" each year, for more than a decade.

"He has his finger in every pie that exists," says Zachariasen. But, he laments, Gell-Mann "is nothing if not arrogant. He has the right to be relatively arrogant, but he would be a nicer person if he weren't."

For example, Zachariasen says, "If you're talking about physics, and he thinks what you're doing is garbage, which he does 90 percent of the time, he has a look of incredulity that says 'how could anybody be so stupid?' "

With his extraordinary command of languages, Gell-Mann is notorious for correcting other people's pronunciation -- sometimes even that of native speakers -- and for correcting foreign words on restaurant menus as he dines. A colleague once chided him by saying that he had just checked with his father and yes, he was indeed pronouncing his own last name correctly.

But in physics, Zachariasen says, Gell-Mann has few, if any, living equals. ''He is a very large figure indeed, as large a figure as has appeared since World War II. His only competitor, really, was Dick Feynman" -- his fellow Caltech physicist and Nobel laureate, who conceived some of the key aspects of quantum theory -- the basic theory of matter and energy and how they interact.

Gell-Mann was a prodigy from the start. His brother Ben, 9 years older, taught him to read at a very early age. He was admitted to Yale University at 13, graduated at 18 and earned his doctorate in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the time he was 21.

He proudly keeps his pens in a plastic pocket protector printed with the words "Nerd Power." (He says he gave one to Al Gore recently.) He has little patience for mistakes -- his own (rare) or those of others.

Harold Morowitz, professor of biology at George Mason University and a leading expert on ecological systems, was Gell-Mann's lab partner in an undergraduate physics course at Yale. Morowitz says Gell-Mann's brilliance was apparent then, and it was already clear he was going places.

Morowitz and Gell-Mann hadn't seen each other for years, but their paths crossed again when both began doing work at the Santa Fe Institute, which Gell-Mann co-founded in 1984 as a sort of think tank exploring the cutting edge of interdisciplinary research on what he describes as simplicity, complexity and complex adaptive systems. Living organisms, for example.

The institute's research is far from an ivory-tower pursuit. Its president, former Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher George Cowan, says its founding "was stimulated by the obviously growing need for a broader and more coordinated approach to the real problems of society. . . . On questions of global security and conditions necessary for a sustainable world, it's evident that we're dealing with almost the ultimate example of complexity."

For Gell-Mann, a particle physicist who has spent most of his life trying to discover the simplest and most basic particles and the interactions from which everything in the universe derives, this emphasis on complexity may seem like a radical shift. But to him, it's a natural extension, a marriage of many diverse interests.

He views simplicity and complexity as two sides of a coin, two intimately connected realms that can best be understood in relation to each other. His newly-published book "The Quark and the Jaguar," in fact, is subtitled ''Adventures in the Simple and the Complex."

Of that work, Morowitz says, "I think it's a very important book because it cuts broadly across human knowledge. Few people are willing to do it, and even fewer are as knowledgeable about the many fields they cut across."

The title characters are illustrative: Quarks are considered the simplest, most basic constituents of all matter. On some level, something as complex and adaptive as a jaguar can be seen as "just a bundle of quarks and electrons," as Gell-Mann put it recently in an interview at the Boston Museum of Science, ''but what a bundle!"

Gell-Mann has coined a word to describe the science of simplicity and complexity: He calls it plectics. No stranger to new coinages, it was he who
invented the term quark after encountering the nonsense syllable in a passage
from Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake." Most of the entry for "Quark" in the Oxford English Dictionary consists of a letter from Gell-Mann explaining its derivation.

But with uncharacteristic modesty, he refrained from using his invented word plectics in his new book. It derives, he explains, from the common Latin root (plectere, to braid) that gave rise to the opposite terms "simplicity" and "complexity."

"There is a simple law for the elementary particles," he says, but that simple law "has produced all of the rich complexity of the universe." His goal now is to "try to get new insights into how quantum mechanics gives rise to the complex world we see around us.. . . To try to understand the rest of plectics."

A conservationist who knows in detail about the seriousness of the environmental problems and population pressures the world is facing, he nevertheless remains an unabashed optimist. As mathematician Isadore M. Singer said during a symposium celebrating Gell-Mann's 60th birthday in 1989, "More than anyone, he firmly believes that the human mind and the human spirit can cure the ills of society."

And in the presence of a mind as powerful as his, that's not hard to believe.

The concept was so strange that as soon as he thought of it, he rejected the idea; the properties of the inferred particles seemed too odd to be possible. It took a while for him to take the idea seriously himself, he says.

Now, three decades later, the sixth and very likely the final type of quark, called the "top," has very likely been found in experiments at Fermilab. But Gell-Mann said recently that is far from the end of the tale -- and may not even be the end of the quarks.

Neither theory nor past experiments have ruled out the possibility that additional pairs of quarks, beyond the three pairs now known, may exist, he says.

In fact, what he says is at present the only viable candidate for a ''theory of everything" that would explain the properties of matter and energy in the universe is something called superstring theory. "For the first time," Gell-Mann says, "we have a really strong candidate for a theory that encompasses all" of physics.

But one implication of the theory is that there are a lot more basic particles out there, yet to be found. In fact, he said, the theory says there should be an infinite number of particles. And there could be many more pairs of quarks.

The least massive of the additional particles predicted by the theory might have been detectable by the Superconducting Supercollider, or SSC, which was scrapped by Congress last fall, he says.

There is still a possibility of finding some additional particles predicted by superstring theory, as well as the "Higgs particle" predicted by some theories. This particle, one of a class called "bosons" that are the carriers of all the basic forces of nature, was the principal intended quarry of the SSC.

Now, that challenge may fall to a not-yet-approved expansion of the huge European particle accelerator ouside Geneva, at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), which could be built by the middle of next decade. Called the LHC, for Large Hadron Collider, it would not reach the same high energy levels as the SSC, but it might still be powerful enough to find these new particles, he says.

Freeman Dyson, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J., agrees that surprising findings are likely to turn up that could either confirm existing theories or lead to new ones. "I don't think we're running out of interesting discoveries. It's always chancy; whatever you do is a gamble."

CHANDL;05/03 NKELLY;05/10,16:36 GELLMA09