Giants and Dwarfs

Isaac Newton was supposed to have said

"If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants."

He has been panned rather widely for it because:

1. Those days people were known for writing stuff dripping with false modesty like this. They would call each other "My esteemed sir" and end letters with salutations like "Your humble servant", while sticking knives into each other.

2. Newton was known to be particularly quarrelsome.

3. There were no known scientific giants on whose shoulders he had stood.

The American theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann had the following explanation for his own extraordinary achievements:

"If I have seen farther than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarfs"


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I read about the following incident involving Gell-Mann recently in a book by Jeremy Bernstein:

Bernstein and a French colleague are in a laboratory in Paris planning to take on a problem. They estimate that it will take the two of them about six months. Murray Gell-Mann stops by and asks them what they are talking about. They explain the problem to him. He walks away but shows up next morning to announce

"Messieurs, le probleme est resolu." (Gentlemen, the problems has been solved.)

Not only does his solving of the problem so fantastically quickly annoys them but so does his perfect French. The most they can say is "I bet he spent all night on it."

Bernstein gets his revenge though, in an indirect way. He takes Gell-Mann on a visit to the Israeli ambassador to the US Abba Eban who knows the Bernstein family very well. Abba Eban spends most time talking to Bernstein. In the end he asks Gell-Mann "Are you a physicist too?" Gell-Mann does not like this at all. (For one thing Gell-Mann was (already or was to be) a Nobel prize winner while Bernstein was not.) This is like asking Einstein "Are you a physicist too?"
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** Added 15 minutes Later, from an essay by Murray Gell-Mann. The "I" refers to Gell-Mann **

Uncharacteristically, I discussed my application to Yale with my father, who asked, "What were you thinking of putting down?" I said, "Whatever would be appropriate for archaeology or linguistics, or both, because those are the things I'm most enthusiastic about. I'm also interested in natural history and exploration." He said, "You'll starve!" After all, this was 1944 and his experiences with the Depression were still quite fresh in his mind; we were still living in genteel poverty. He could have quit his job as the vault custodian in a bank and taken a position during the war that would have utilized his talents — his skill in mathematics, for example — but he didn't want to take the risk of changing jobs. He felt that after the war he would regret it, so he stayed where he was. This meant that we really didn't have any spare money at all.

I asked him, "What would you suggest?" He mentioned engineering, to which I replied, "I'd rather starve. If I designed anything it would fall apart." And sure enough when I took an aptitude test a year later I was advised to take up nearly anything but engineering. Then my father suggested, "Why don't we compromise — on physics?"

In 1951, at the age of 21, Murray Gell-Mann was a post-doc at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he often encountered Albert Einstein. "I could have spoken with him," Murray says, "but at that time I didn't like the kind of people who approached great figures, introduced themselves, got into conversation with them, and reported the experience to others, saying "I know Einstein," and so on. So I didn't approach him. Today, I would almost certainly behave differently, asking the old man about his thoughts years ago when he was carrying out the greatest physics research since Newton's. It would have been exciting. Instead, in 1951 I said "Good morning" occasionally and Einstein would answer with "Guten morning" or something of the kind, but that was it.

I tried various higher symmetry schemes and then finally hit upon what I called the eightfold way, with the group SU(3) as an approximate symmetry. That worked very nicely. At the time I was interested in India and in the various religious traditions of India — not that I would embrace any religion — my interest was merely academic. I thought it would be a good joke to call the scheme the eightfold way, since the particles tended in many cases to come in sets of eight. Some silly people wrote books trying to connect my work on particle physics with oriental mysticism, whereas the connection was only a joke.