Skip to main content

Strange Beauty - George Johnson ****

This is a second edition of a scientific biography of the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann, first published in 1999. This edition adds in the remaining 20 years of Gell-Mann's life. Like most scientists, his contributions may not have been as outstanding in his later years, but it gives the complete picture - and he certainly continued to be interesting as a person.

George Johnson (who clearly like a touch of scientific beauty, having previously written The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments) does a good job of taking us into both the world and work of Gell-Mann. Not a household name, but one of the greats of twentieth century physics. Part of the problem, compared with the science that came before - even most of Einstein's - was that, as Johnson puts it, Gell-Mann's 'discoveries were not of things but of patterns - mathematical symmetries that seemed to reflect, in some ultimately mysterious way, the manner in which subatomic particles behaved.'

Unlike most biographies, the opening does not start by describing the ancestry of the scientist, but rather tries to untangle the etymology of Gell-Mann's surname (in part, probably because he was consistently vague about it). Johnson notes that his older brother's surname was Gelman - the immediate assumption being that the egotistical Gell-Mann and adopted a grandiose surname, had it not been that his father's name was found in a phone book as also being Gell-Mann, which he adapted from Gellmann (yet another spelling). Johnson does uncover some ancestral details, but there is always the feeling that he is uncovering pieces of a puzzle that can seem as intricate and abstruse as the 'Eight-fold way' Gell-Mann devised for particle physics.

There are a number of ways of constructing a scientific biography that digs below the surface level of the physics as this does. A popular approach is to alternate chapters on the science and on the personal life. Johnson opts to integrate the two. I can see why this appeals contextually, but I think it makes it harder to get your head around what will always be a hard-to-grasp set of concepts. It's not just because the science is broken up, but also because we see the gradual development of the theory in snippets it can be hard to keep track from chapter to chapter as small steps forward and some reverses are dropped into the mix. It is entirely possible to pick up what you are being told, but it can be hard work to stay on top of it - I found I had to reread several sets of pages. However, Johnson's handling of Gell-Mann's professional and personal life is sufficiently engaging that there is always something to keep you going.

As I often have to say these days, it's too long at over 500 pages before getting to the notes and such. It has proved possible to write excellent scientific biographies of the likes of Newton, Einstein and Feynman at a far more practical length, so it's not a matter of coping with either a vast scientific output or a complicated personal life. It might seem odd as surely more words is more work to produce, but it feels lazy not to edit it to a more readable length. On the upside, though, for the output of an academic press, the book is very reasonably priced.

Overall, Johnson makes it clear that we have in Gell-Mann both an impressive contribution to physics and a life well worth exploring.

Paperback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...
Post a Comment
Read more

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...
Post a Comment
Read more