Murray Gell-Mann - The Institute for Advanced Study (28/200)

To listen to more of Murray Gell-Mann’s stories, go to the playlist: • Murray Gell-Mann (Scie...
New York-born physicist Murray Gell-Mann (1929-2019) was a theoretical physicist. His considerable contributions to physics include the theory of quantum chromodynamics. He was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. [Listener: Geoffrey West]
TRANSCRIPT: It’s a sort of hotel, of course, and there were people there for the year, for the academic year, invited by the management. And Robert and a couple of senior members… and Robert favored formalism. He had a very different set of criteria for judging things from Viki's. He was very impressed with the relativistic methods of calculation that Dick Feynman had developed, and Stückelberg. Schwinger's method was quite clumsy, although it was covariant it was quite clumsy and I think nobody has ever used it except Schwinger and his students. But the Stückelberg-Feynman method was very useful. And Robert was impressed with the formalism that went with deriving it. Feynman, of course, had his own derivation which was perfectly adequate, it wasn't very elegant. Freeman Dyson had a sort of a sketch of a derivation that he published and he impressed Robert enormously. Why, I never really understood, but, Robert was very enthusiastic about Freeman, and I couldn't see that he had contributed very much except to make the derivation slightly better.
[GW] The derivation here... do you mean renormalization scheme?
No, the derivation of...
[GW] Or do you mean the derivation of the rules?
...the derivation of Dick Feynman's… of the rules… rules, or the Stückelberg rules, whichever you want to call them. And... and then, yes, the other thing that Freeman did was to give a very, very crude sketch of how to renormalize to all orders, but it was extremely crude. It was improved and turned into a real proof by Salam and Matthews in a paper that I think was 140 pages long, and by John Ward in a letter that was maybe 20 lines long. Graham should be delighted that John Ward was then at Oxford and Salam and Matthews at Cambridge. The…
[GW] Did you know Ward, incidentally?
Oh, Ward, I knew Ward extremely well… he was a remarkable character, a remarkable character… he came to the institute and I saw a lot of him and I knew him very, very well.
[GW] What was the atmosphere like there?
Yeah, so they... anyway, what I was going to say was that the atmosphere was rather peculiar because, Robert invited a lot of people who had done formal things that somewhat resembled the formal method for deriving the Feynman rules in Dyson's manner. So lots of people who had fiddled with wiggly surfaces and in space-time, wiggly space-like surfaces in space-time and various other things; Costa… Olivier Costa de Beauregard, le Comte Olivier Costa de Beauregard, who had played with positrons as electrons going backwards in time. In other words, anyone who had done anything formal that vaguely resembled these advances in formalism that Stückelberg and Feynman had accomplished, was invited there. Well, these people were not very creative, most of them. They had done some little bit of formalism on, for example, on wiggly space-like surfaces, but they were not really doing much in the way of physics. There were a few people who were very interested in physics and were very clever. I was there during two… two academic years because I spent the calendar year ’51 there, so I actually met two sets of people, which was very nice.

[@chriskindler10]

the only person Gell-Mann ever liked was Gell-Mann

[@ihp5353]

so true haha

[@Klausffccc]

And Fermi

[@NothingMaster]

So now it’s poor Dyson’s turn to be trashed, too?! I’m desperately trying to find a redeeming value in these self-serving interviews, but Gell-Mann’s constant belittling of every physicist under the sun makes it all but an impossible task. He has really managed to paint a horribly pathetic picture of himself and his pitiful and bleeding ego in these interviews. Part of the legacy of a disturbed personality, pathologically bent on gaining recognition by dismissing and belittling the works of others.

[@us-Bahn]

Poor Alex, side-tracked from your efforts to construct an all encompassing unification theory of the universe, you search instead for a Kumbaya theory of harmony and emotional unity inside the walls of academia. Good luck with that.

[@arnav257]

^ two kinds of people, only one the wiser.

[@edwardjones2202]

Christ this guy is up himself. This dismissively alluded to work that Dyson did was lauded by most physicists at the time. Jeremey Bernstein said that Dyson was his hero for having done it, and shown how Schwinger, Dyson and Feynman's approaches were equivalent. It is seen by most as Nobel worthy. Even this reference to (Shtutelberg - sic) is a pointed remark, as no one else puts this guy in the picture (which is why I can't spell his name!!!!).

[@allybally0021]

I think the nicest thing you can say is that he was very competitive in nature.

[@eoghancallaghy3756]

did Mann ever like anyone?

[@jyotishrajthoudam]

Victor Weiskopf

[@Studentofgosset]

Mann liked Mann

[@TheJlter]

Mann probably did apply to institute of adv study ... but was turned down ... then you need to hate them ...

[@thesceptic1018]

He quite liked Fermi, as did everyone. He didn’t dislike Dirac, though Dirac couldn’t bear to be in the same room.

[@edwardjones2202]

@@thesceptic1018 Dirac couldn't be in the same room with Gell-Mann? Haha

[@accideux5182]

He talkin

[@yourcousinsshow5540]

He’d be so much more likable if he didn’t trash his contemporaries at every turn.

[@Nostradamus_Order33]

Murray Gell-Mann sounds to like a genius

[@SUMITYADAV-mt8xn]

He is actually a genius

[@tonyscott1658]

But he isn't one. Freeman Dyson was a math genius and Gell-Mann gives him so little credit. Not classy. Gell-Mann had good instincts when it came to Physics but he lacks grace with all due respect.

[@EGarrett01]

@@tonyscott1658 Genius and grace don't need to be found together. Einstein tried to get his wife to sign a contract to agree to do his laundry and cook his meals and never talk to him.

[@shamsmehdi3725]

@@tonyscott1658 Dyson was even more arrogant then Gellmann. Compared to Gellmann, Dyson is a nobody in terms of accomplishment (all due respect).

[@tonyscott1658]

@@shamsmehdi3725 Do you mean in terms of accomplishments in Physics vindicated by experiments? yes. Mind you. Dyson mathematically cleaned up a lot of results in QFT.