Word: gelle
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...year-old Yale freshman wanted to study archaeology, but his father thought engineering was a more promising profession. "I couldn't stand engineering," recalls Caltech's Professor Murray Gell-Mann, the former child prodigy, "so I put down the closest thing, physics." It was a happy choice. Last week, for his brilliant work on the basic nature of the atom, Gell-Mann, now 40, won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics...
...early 1950s, when Gell-Mann made his debut as a theoretical physicist, the discovery of a host of strange and short-lived bits of matter had turned the once orderly world of subatomic physics into what scientists called a "zoo." To bring some order out of the chaos, Gell-Mann-at the age of 24 -formulated his Theory of Strangeness (named after Francis Bacon's line: "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion"). He assigned a value to each of the puzzling new particles: a "strangeness" number based on their peculiar rate...
...Eightfold Way. From strangeness, Gell-Mann and Israeli Physicist Yuval Ne'eman progressed to a new theory that Gell-Mann named the "eightfold way" (after the eight ways that Buddhists use to stop pain). It organized the particles into groups of eight or ten members. To fill gaps in his table, he postulated yet unencountered particles. In 1964, his theory was strong]y confirmed by the discovery of a bit of matter that Gell-Mann had previously described: the omega-minus particle...
Probing deeper into the secrets of the atom, Gell-Mann and Physicist George Zweig then independently conceived a trio of basic building blocks out of which all the other particles -and, indeed, all matter-could be constructed. With his usual literary flair, Gell-Mann named these imaginary particles "quarks" (from James Joyce's cryptic line in Finnegans Wake: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!"). Gell-Mann cautioned that quarks might not exist outside his equations, but an Australian researcher recently reported finding them among the debris of atmospheric atoms broken up by cosmic rays (TIME, Sept. 12). Even if quarks...
Quarterback Dave Smith called an extremely intelligent game last week, and the team seemed to gell efficiently under his leadership. With end Peter Varney and tackle Fritz Reed returning to the starting lineup, the Crimson will have the left side of its offensive line intact once again, and Smith can run the power sweep to either side without worrying about its reduced effectiveness...