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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.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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