Strange Beauty
Subtitle: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics
Publisher: Vintage; Vintage Books
Published: October 17, 2000
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 464
ISBN-13: 9780679756880
Subjects: Physics; Biography & Autobiography; Biography / Autobiography; Biography/Autobiography; Scientists - General; Biography & Autobiography / Science & Technology
First sentence: Scouring the old Manhattan telephone directories from the early years of the century, now relegated to decaying spools of microfilm in a dark corner of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, one looks in vain for the curious appellation "Gell-Man."
Description: "Science writer George Johnson brings his talent to the first biography of Nobel Prize laureate Murray Gell-Mann, the man who revolutionized modern particle physics with his theories of the quark and the Eightfold Way.".

"Born into a family of Jewish immigrants on New York's East 14th Street, Gell-Mann demonstrated his prodigious genius from an early age - he entered Yale at fifteen, completed his Ph.D. at twenty-one, and was soon uncovering the secrets of subatomic particles and illuminating the elegant symmetries of the universe. Before long, a favorite pastime among physicists was arguing over who was smarter, Richard Feynman or Murray Gell-Mann."--BOOK JACKET.